IT manager for the day

I hate computers when they go wrong. I spent a month at Xmas trying to get a machine to work which ended in failure. We have three networked computers plus a blackberry for on the move. Lisa's went tits up two days. It's a Dell. You press the start button it goes orange then refuses to start. In the old days having one machine that went wrong with no internet was a nightmare and costly.
If you go to PC World the queue for things gone wrong is always bigger than the sale queue.
Computers are not yet white goods.

A little research on Google reveals the GX 270 has issues with a row of capacitors on the motherboard. Ten minutes to learn how to open the machine up ( no screws) reveals about 4 of the capacitors are burnt out.

This makes the motherboard toast. So we have what many go through. A computer dead with no backup of important files. We thought we had backup but its incomplete.

I removed the hard drive and tried getting it to work as a slave on another machine which has Windows 98. The computer recognises the different hard drive. Windows however refuses to cooperate. We are 4 hours into this and its grinding to a halt.

I come across Pc File recovery by accident, its also free. Surprise surprise it works. Most of the files are there but some are still missing. Anyway I now have a way at looking at dead machine hard drives.

Link http://www.pcinspector.de/FSGuard/info.htm?language=1

Its in German but has an English translation.