Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Need computer help please

Is it a dv6?

I had one of those go TU. I wonder if HP has a recall?

Got 3 dv6's - bought one for myself last year for consulting on the side, one for my son as high school graduation present for college, other for my sister-in-law to use as a work at home computer.

All working fine so far.

What happened with yours?

I have an HP laptop that the HP software started giving me the hard drive failure warning. I used Belarc advisor and found out it was a Western Digital drive, downloaded the WD diagnosis and repair softwares (Data Lifeguard), ran their 'fix it' software from a CD and the HP software no longer gives me any warning. This has been about 6 months or so since. The laptop used to freeze up often and if I installed Sp1 (for Win7) it would freeze constantly.

I DID back all valuable data prior to running the repair software though just to be safe. It no longer freezes either.

Did you know as long as you have your key code, (Belarc can help here if your sticker is worn/lost), you did not need to order the recovery disks. Since Win Vista, you can download each respective OS, be it Home, Premium, Enterprise, Pro etc, ALL OS'es are free and legal to download on the www so you can reload your operating system.

If there's room in the box, you can also add a 2d hard drive. It's fairly simple to install and it will show up on My Computer as another drive. Use it for backups and storage.

Before the drive fails completely you need to get a second hard drive and do what is called an Image Backup. This will make a mirror image copy of your current hard disk (operating system, programs, data etc.). You then install the new hard disk and restore Image Backup and you are ready to go.

I would suggest investing in an external HD enclosure that has a USB 3.0 interface. Use this for backup along with Acronis backup software. Doing a full system restore over the internet will be SLOW. You can buy a USB 3.0 card to install in your current PC if it does not have USB 3.0 connections.

Windows 7 Image Backup

BTW, buy a can of compressed air for cleaning PC's. Open up yours about once a month and blow all the dust out of it. You can find it at Walmart or Target. That is probably the source of your premature HD failures. The excess dust inside your PC causes components to overheat.

P.S. Don't use your shop air compressor. Too much air pressure and it probably has oil in it.