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My three-year-old Dell Inspiron laptop is beginning to give me the dreaded Blue Screen of Death occasionally over the last month or two. Usually I can restart it and it runs okay after that, but it's been increasingly slow although I rarely have more running than Firefox, Semagic, and Open Office. A couple of months ago I bought a registry optimizer and that seemed to help a bit, but the last week or so it's been crashing again.
Oh, and this machine runs on XP. I'm ascared of Vista.
Suggestions? I'm backing up my most valued data in case the whole thing just dies, but oy. Not sure what to do here. What is the expected lifetime of a laptop, anyway?
Safari. I can complete a download with Explorer, but then it just sits there and when I try to actually run it, nothing happens. It seems to have completely forgotten how to deal with a .dmg.
FWIW, a couple years ago I know the useful lifetime of laptops was 18 months, at least that's what we were told when my office was leasing them (which is suspect, since the people telling us this stood to make more money if we believed them). My rule of thumb was to double that.
Under no circumstances change over to Vista -- it runs like a dog on smaller older laptops.
One thing you could do, is back up all your data and then reinstall XP and all the other programs onto a cleaned out hard disk. Sometimes that gets rid of the problem, unless it turns out to be more like a failing hard drive, et cetera.
JZ -- I hadn't realized you were on a Mac. In your situation, I'd consider visiting my nearest Genius Bar.
Ah, frig. It's a big old half-dome years-old iMac that weighs a ton. I've taken it to the Genius Bar twice in the last couple of months, and it's a loathsome task.
is back up all your data and then reinstall XP and all the other programs onto a cleaned out hard disk.
Oh, lord. There goes my weekend.
Consuela, sometimes time equals money -- you might well be better off getting a nice new laptop instead, especially because prices have come seriously down in the last 3 years. (FWIW, I've been really impressed with HP's customer support on my desktop machine.)
Well, it seems silly to not even TRY to do this. Got a pointer for some resources that will help me reinstall XP?
Sorry, I'd be as much at sea as you are!
Wiping a hard disk and reinstalling XP is something that a small local computer repair shop should be able to do, though.
JZ, have you rebooted?
Also, try running Disk Utility and repair permissions, and then do a repair disk.
