Gripe of the day - What is yours?

[Sir Trev]

Originally Posted by daddyjob

Have you gone into the bios to see if the HDD is still showing as an active drive?

Eh? The fans come on full blast but nothing else happens. The hard drive does nothing so I don't know how I can check for anything I'm afraid. Nothing is unplugged so... It has been unhappy and very slow for weeks with a hard drive error popping up on the weekly diagnostic check so it could simply be a dead drive. Six or seven years is not bad for a base level home use machine that's on for most of the day every day.

[Heorot]

I've had that (drive errors on startup). It was the drive slowly dying as more and more sectors went bad. It finally died when the boot sector went bad. I hope you have been taking regular backups to external media.

[Littlepeahead]

The dishwasher is showing fault F7 again. It does this every so often, and it's a faff to sort out. It;s a 13 year old dishwasher and I have a newer one ready to go in as soon as I get myself organised to pick it up from my dad's. The thought of having to actually wash up myself fills me with dread.

[maviczap]

Originally Posted by Sir Trev

HP desktop pc's. Mine has stopped working so I took the side off, used an air duster which covered me in fluffy gunge, tried it again and... nothing. Powers up but the hard drive is not spooling up. For goodness sake - it's only seven years old Off to PC World tomorrow to see if they can fix it cheaper than the £500 it will cost to replace it.

Originally Posted by Sir Trev

Eh? The fans come on full blast but nothing else happens. The hard drive does nothing so I don't know how I can check for anything I'm afraid. Nothing is unplugged so... It has been unhappy and very slow for weeks with a hard drive error popping up on the weekly diagnostic check so it could simply be a dead drive. Six or seven years is not bad for a base level home use machine that's on for most of the day every day.

This fortnights MicroMart had a little piece about hard drive failure. The most common cause is heat failure of the HDD's chipset, and with the symptoms you've described, it could be that.

It is possible to fix this, using a chipset from the same donor HDD, but I doubt PC world will suggest this. Especially as the drive isn't even spinning up.

I'd get a usb cable & Sata adaptor and see if the drive is dead.

Any precious stuff on it Sir Trev?

[Sir Trev]

It's been getting slower for some time so daily backups have been in place for a while so no issues there. The amount of crud in the chipset heat sink was amazing so I hope it's not that part thats given up.

What made me laugh was a call from Lady Poppy to report PC World said they would not touch it as it was over five years old. Really? Now with a local indie shop round the corner I'd never noticed on recommendation of a neighbour. Fingers crossed.

[maviczap]

That doesn't surprise me at all

[Littlepeahead]

I'm sad today upon hearing that a colleague miscarried on Sunday. It was her first pregnancy and to her surprise she was expecting identical twins. She'd recently got a proper bump so we were all excited for her. I'd even shown her a pic of me with Supervox's twin boys.

What's going to be very hard is that her line manager is currently on maternity leave and will be back a week or two before my colleague's due date would have been.

[maviczap]

Best let her line manager know, if you haven't done so. I would

[Littlepeahead]

Yes they have told her. She and I aren't in the same department but we work together a lot and she's someone I always enjoy chatting to as she's so upbeat.

[maviczap]

Cool, that's good team working, that doesnt always happen these days