Thread: "I had a heart attack because of my computer" association

That's why I usually buy cheap generic PC's.. They're easy to work on, parts are easily obtainable and all of the possibilities that you mentioned would have taken a couple of hours to take care of. The only downside is that the new ones coming out now run on Vi**a (the reason why I am running Linux on this one)

Oh man - I had a cold sweat as I was reading that. Similar thing happened to me several years back just as I was finishing my thesis. It all ended well in the end, and I was able to get the machine working again.

I backed up and went and bought a new computer the next day.

Glad things worked out for you in the end Ockham - and good luck with the job. I know how much effort those jobs take to get. I'll be rooting for you!

James.

I've had some major issues, but mostly cause computers have been a huge hobby of mine for the past five years.

I remember countless nights in college where I'd have crashing issues and refused to go to sleep until I had everything up and running perfectly. Once I get to troubleshooting, I just can't seem to stop.

I've backed off recently now that I've gotten quite into straights; my last big computer project was setting up my watercooling system on my gaming rig (which is in the same, double-wide case as my fileserver). That was... I don't even remember, but sometime last school year.

I once managed to screw up my thesis, a couple of days before having to hand it in.
It sucked, but I have always been paranoid about having daily backups, so I lost only a day of work.
In this day and age, USB keys are your friend. I always copy important stuff to USB storage.

Eeek. I hosed my Mac during a firmware update...the folks at the Apple store were great...I didn't lose anything...the tech made a copy of the entire HD to my external drive and I just had to copy over my files to the MacBook. Still scary.

Rules:

1. Backup hourly.
2. See Rule 1.

Also, what the tech did, you could probably do yourself if you got the steps and watched him in detail.

I've had more problems with PCs than with Macs....much of which I attribute to Microsquish and some of their resource-hogging apps.

MS Outlook...the world's only virus with a GUI.

Being in the computer industry I know exactly how all you feel. One thing I learned early is have a back up plan. If I asked a few of you what type of back up plan you have and you had to stop to think about it, then you are in for a world of hurt sooner than later. They can be as simple as an external hard drive or as complicated as an online backup utility with a redundant network server. Personally I have 2 external hard drives in rotation that I have copies of anything personal (photos, videos, music, and documents). Everything else can be replaced. Start researching now before it's way too late.

WireBeard - I love that Outcrook quote, too bad it's true

What a bummer. Anything important of mine is backed up pretty regularly to a different hard drive or kept in the cloud. I've got everything I need to resuscitate a Mac or PC though, so unless all my rigs go down, I shouldn't be too hurt by it.

For those of you with multiple systems and a Mac, invest in a firewire cable. You can hook that mac up via firewire and access the harddrive like an external. If you're a Mac only type person, you can use it to write images back onto the harddrive, making things extremely easy (assuming you know how to use it). I bought a good firewire cable just for that!

The absolute worst time you'll ever have though is when a harddrive literally dies. When freezing and tapping just won't do it, and there's absolutely no way to access it unless you send it in to one of those expensive recovery companies. That's a rough thing to have to tell a client

I've murdered many systems and I keep a fire extinguisher right nest to my desk... no foolin! I overclock and do extreme benchmarking using phase change units that I build. Phase change freezes the cpu and north bridge and video processor. Bringing a cpu down to -100C + does have it problems... condensation is a killer and I've had 2 boards go up in flames (see fire extinguisher). In the past year I've killed a Q6600, 2 E8600's and a Q9550 along with 3 of the motherboards they were on. Right now I have a C1 stepping Q9550 to 4.2ghz on a p35 board..... nice a stable.... for now.

Originally Posted by myfreakinears

Being in the computer industry I know exactly how all you feel. One thing I learned early is have a back up plan. If I asked a few of you what type of back up plan you have and you had to stop to think about it, then you are in for a world of hurt sooner than later. They can be as simple as an external hard drive or as complicated as an online backup utility with a redundant network server. Personally I have 2 external hard drives in rotation that I have copies of anything personal (photos, videos, music, and documents). Everything else can be replaced. Start researching now before it's way too late.

At work I have the fileserver which hosts daily backups of every important server.
It has a RAID5 disk configuration, and we backup the fileserver weekly to LTO3 tapes.

At home all important data is on my workstation with hardware RAID1 disk config, and backed up regularly to external USB disks. 1 of those disks is always off-site.

What I really want is an LTO drive for in my workstation.
But for the money they cost, it is just not going to happen any time soon.

Still, my solution is better than what 99% of the computer users do, which is usually nothing.
I know several people who lost months of important family data in a disk crash. none of them had backups.