OT: Dell support

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Apr 06, 2007, Richard Kreiss wrote:
>One of my neighbors called me after spending an hour with Dell tech support.
>
>Her computer appeared not to be booting passed the post.  All that would
>come up was the Dell Logo thing. 
>
>The tech support person had her unplug her flat panel monitor from her UPS
>and plug it directly into the wall outlet.  After plugging and plugging the
>monitor and doing other things, he concluded that either the processor was
>bad or she had bad memory.
>
>Oh, by the way, she did tell them at the start that the monitor was smoking
>before she turned it off and shut her system down.
>
>I had her bring the computer to me.  I plugged in one of my monitors and low
>and behold, like magic, it came up.  

Obviously she's missing the nosmoke.exe program or it's out of date.

...
>However, it looks like there are gremlins in the community, another
>neighbors computer crashed Wed. night.  I need to see if I can get the data
>off the hard drive which was not backed up.  This is one of our board
>members and there are 3 years worth of documents on that drive.  If can't,
>I'll probably have to scan all of these or at least the most recent onto my
>system and then burn them to a Cd or DVD.

One way to recover files from trashed Windows systems is to boot
from a Knoppix live-cd, mount the Windows partition, and copy the
files to external media (e.g. hard drive, flash, etc.).  If they
don't have an external drive, this is a good time to get them to
buy one and use it for backups.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual
way.  This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of
complaining.
                -- Jef Raskin http://jefraskin.com/