Dealing with Certain Death

PC Dying, Screen Pixellated, What Do I Do?

[inuwolf]

My computer has crashed before due to hard drive problems. This time--no idea. After just a few minutes, the screen gets staticky (yeah, weird!). It's a Windows XP so I guess I should expect this, but still... I'm guessing I have only a few precious minutes left before the whole things dies (luckily I've got most of my data backed up), what should I do?

What should I do?

[Scruffy]

Can you smell burning?

[jatar_k]

>> most of my data
back up anything else you need

then try to figure it out

[inuwolf]

No burning yet, but my last two crashes resulted from broken fans.

Right now I'm backing up pretty petty things I've missed like all my bookmarks in Firefox and some things on my desktop. Every once and a while I accidentally tilt or shake the screen and it gets a little staticky again in the right corner. This makes me think its not a hard drive problem but some other hardware. Also, I've restored my computer to the system state about a week ago and its still having the problems. Should I bother rebooting in safe mode?

[inuwolf]

Sorry for the double post but, better question:

Should I reformat my hard drive? The weird screen activity has stopped for a moment so I think I may have the time. I bother asking because I don't think this is a hard drive problem.

[jatar_k]

I would look more toward something with the monitor or even a vid card

have a spare?

[inuwolf]

no. but i have a 6-year warranty with Gateway so they should replace it free of charge. my only concern is that for whatever reason they will insist on replacing my hard drive as well, as they have in the past.

[kaled]

The monitor's dying. "Staticky" means CRT I guess - they don't last forever, five years if you're lucky and two or three years if you're unlucky.

Kaled.

[inuwolf]

It wasn't exactly staticky (poor choice of words on my part) just really shaky, with lines of pixels displaced, giving the screen a sort of prickly look. Luckily the problem turned out to be the motherboard not the hard drive; I'm already back in business. :)