Refurbished PCs

All the NickWorks Dell base units and monitors have now been sold. But I still have a few very good Stone machines available as cheap replacements when things go wrong. See the specifications and price.

Data recovery

When things go seriously wrong there may be no option but to replace your PC. The question always is, "what will happen to all my photos/emails/documents?". Hopefully you will have some backups (see the NickWorks discussion of backups) but luckily it is normally possible to recover all the files from your old disk, even if Windows won't run. The disk has to be removed and placed in an external enclosure, and then the files viewed and copied from another machine. There will be ownership and permission issues, as the new machine will not have any rights over the old files, but these issues can be overcome quite easily. Then it's a matter of putting the files back into the right places on the replacement machine.There is a Microsoft utility ("Windows Easy Transfer") to help with this.

DVD drive not working

A laptop's DVD drive stopped working - the device manager showed it as not working. Uninstalling and rebooting led back to the same situation.

A Microsoft "FixIt" failed - but creating a new registry subkey got it working:

 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Controller0\EnumDevice1 with value 1.
 
Contact NickWorks IT support for any problem - it can usually be fixed!!