Can anyone help?

[Liz]

My nephew has been unable to connect to the Internet and now he is having problems with the PC itself.
He says he put a restore CD in and it stopped working and then a black screen came up with a white dot in the middle which keeps flashing on and off and this is what he gets now each time he switches on the computer.
What I know about computers could be written on the back of a postage stamp and there'd still be room left!!
He has been off school for the past four weeks due to illness and could really do with the computer to pass the time. It would be even better if he could get onto the internet.
If anyone could help him I'd be willing to pay for time and any travelling expenses.
Thanks!

[Moonboots]

Hi Liz,

Its hard to say what it could be to tell you the truth.

If this cannot be repaired with the restore disc then I think it would be better with a complete format of the whole drive and Windows reinstalled on it.

Just my thought but I would wait until other suggestions first on this forum to see what others say.

If you did go with the format option then any files already on the computer which your nephew would want to keep would need to be backed up but thats if you can get into DOS mode to do this.

I know there are words here you might not know but others will.

So anybody else got any suggestions for the lady then.

[Greenrunner]

Liz
First step is to know what happens when PC switched on (assume it is PC).
Does it make any "beep" sounds"?
Does anything at all appeart on the screen?
If so what can be seen.

[Liz]

I asked my nephew and he said when he switches the pc on, the name of the make of the pc comes up then a black screen comes up with a little white rectangle in the right top corner. It doesn't make any noise.

[RIR]

Hi

Have you, or can you borrow, another monitor to try?

When he switches on, do the lights on the front of his processor unit come on, and can he hear the fans whirring? Has he checked all the connections on his processor unit (the grey box) to make sure they're firm?

In what way could he not connect to the internet prior to these problems?

What are the computers specifications, i.e., manufacturer, processor (e.g., Pentium 500), which operating system (e.g. Windows 98/ME/XP), how old is it, etc?

Has he recently updated his hardware, or installed any new software?

If he's using WIndows 98 or ME (or even 95), has he a start-up disk?

Ian.

[Moonboots]

If the cursor is blinking waiting for a command then it looks like the hard-drive is not getting located and it could be that the hard-drive has been wiped or the configuration on the bios has changed or maybe the problem is coming from the motherboard.

If its WinXP then you could have had a virus which has totally wiped the drive.

Look more deaper into what was happening when the computer was unable to connect. what was the error messages it was getting.

[jjc]

Hi Liz,

I’ve just spent ages typing you out a rather long and complicated reply with a load of questions (some of which I answered myself along the way). I got to the end and realised what a load of drivel I was talking and that none of it was likely to help you with your problem.

You see, as you may have gathered from the posts before mine, the list of possible causes for your nephew’s problem is quite lengthy. If I were a gambling man (lottery excluded), experience would tell me to put my money on a hard drive fault; the combination of software failure (the internet connection) and the inability to write to (the recovery disk failing) or read from (the flashing cursor) the hard drive are just a little too coincidental for my liking.

My advice is to get your nephew to try the recovery disk again. The way that the recovery CDs usually work is to wipe the system and then rebuild it from scratch. If the previous recovery failed after wiping the system but before rebuilding it, then it could be as simple as running recovery again and letting it complete the job…

If that doesn’t work (and I suspect it won’t) then the next thing I’d do is pick up the phone.

Problems like you describe are almost always fixed by taking the lid off the machine and rolling up your sleeves. As you have indicated you are willing to pay somebody to repair this I would suggest you get a professional; their work is a) insured and b) guaranteed (at least it should be). They will also probably be the quickest option if your nephew is still off school. Try the Caithness.org business index.

Seriously, I’ve been in IT for the best part of a decade and I can’t think of a single instance when a ‘dead’ PC has been an easy fix. You might strike it lucky with the recovery CD, but if not you are looking at things that aren’t easy to do, and even less easy to explain…

Hopefully somebody will prove me wrong, but that’s what I’d suggest.

Good luck

[jjc]

I can’t think of a single instance when a ‘dead’ PC has been an easy fix

Just thought of one... I once got a phone call from somebody whose PC wouldn't boot and they said it was was making a 'really quick beeping noise'.

When I heard the noise I asked them if there was anything resting on the keyboard... they moved the book they had been reading and all was fine

[Liz]

Thanks JJC! Not so much for the technical info (thankful though I am for that!) but for the laugh

Thanks to all of you for taking the time to contact me. I'm really grateful and will pass on all the info to my nephew.

Liz

[Anonymous]

Sorry i gave the rong name

[Moonboots]

As JJC said.

Get a professional in but they can be abit expensive.

There are others but speak to the company your nephew got the computer from as it could be still under warranty.

Let us know how you get on.