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!!

WIndows activation

When a machine is reinstalled (see NickWorks Services), re-entering the product key should allow Windows to be activated. It requires that you install the right version of Windows to match the key - so before starting to reinstall, it is important to have these two pieces of information.

Every Windows PC should have a sticker on the case with this information on it - but it is sometimes missing or too faded to read (this happens a lot on laptops).

Luckily there are a few utilities that allow recovery of this information from the Windows registry. It's encrypted, so it can't be read directly.

I used ProduKey, which makes it quite easy. It can access the information on an external disk or USB key, so if Windows won't boot, you can still get the code, as long as the disk still functions.

If the code is barred by Microsoft, it could indicate that the installed version of Windows was from a suspect source.

Corrupted profile issues

I have seen this problem a couple of times: the user can't log in and gets a "The User Profile Service failed the logon" message. The cure is to swap the registry entries relating to the profile and its backup. 

But if the locked-out user is the only administrator there is a problem. On this laptop I had to

(1) Boot from the built in Windows repair (equivalent to booting from the Windows DVD) and start a command prompt.

(2) Run regedit to edit the registry to enable the built-in administrator account  (http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/102552-built-administrator-enable-winre.html)

 (3) Log in with this account and fix the profile (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947215)

Keyboard problems

An HP Mini 200 netbook is displaying problems - intermittently, none of the keys work except the vowels, which are displayed with accents. This behaviour continues when using the on-screen keyboard or an external USB keyboard. Conclusion - the Alt-Gr key is sticking down. Returning to HP under warranty did not get the repair done, as they claimed it had been subjected to liquid spillage (the owner insists it hadn't). The "liquid intrusion sensor" is alleged to be a white paper label inside the case.

A quote to replace the keyboard amounted to £70 - but simply removing the useless Alt-Gr key fixed the problem.

Cutting your losses

Today's laptop has strange problems that I have failed to explain. The Windows firewall service is missing. All downloads and attachments are falsely reported as infected and are deleted - though the machine is free of malware. I would love to spend the time to get to the bottom of this and find out why - but realistically, it is quicker to just reinstall!