EMERGENCY

 

I have an hp compaq 7620 laptop and I was watching the snooker on Iplayer last night. All of a sudden the computer froze and I had to power it down. (I know this is not recommended) Anyway, I powered it back up a few minutes later and got the old START NORMAL lingo & LAST CONFIGURATION, ETC. So I pressed enter and....now I can't get beyond the WINDOWS STARTING logo. I pressed f1 and got into restore former settings but nothing happened. 

 

Can anyone help - please don't get complicated and remember I cannot get beyond the logo, so I can't get into system restore either - which would normally be my first port of call.

Keith - just been on the Hp support web site and they don't do a 7620 laptop - do you mean 6720?

Not that I have a clue what the problem is  and unless the red & whites are available to night you won't get many replies tonight - Arsenal are just about to give us, NUFC, a kicking - off to suffer, again.

It's okay, problem solved. Phew!!!

You can't leave it like that.

The suspense is killing me.

Sorry, Brett, It was 9.30pm before I got anywhere with it. (Yes Eggy 6720 not 7620 -typo on my part!!!)

Anyway, I was trying to get into the bios and hitting all the Fnumbers at the top - nothing. Then I held down the F2 a bit longer and got check disc, etc. It ran a memory scan and check disc and rebooted and the computer came back to life. But it gave me a scare, it was going to cost about £50 to £80 to get it reformatted and I had a feeling it would be something I could possibly fix myself. But two other things I did in desperation - I took out the hard drive and the battery. So I actually don't know if one or all of those things contributed to it. Hope that explains it better. I couldn't bear the thought of not playing Chess Titans or watching / listening to You Tube. It's frightening and sad to realise how much I rely on my computers.

Back up to an external drive regularly.  There's no excuse when you can get first class disk imaging software for free.  Google on "Macrium Reflect".  Once a week minimums if you are an active user!

Also pick up a free DropBox or Amazon Cloud account to copy your current work to in the background.  If you are a really serious user buy a cheap NFS with RAID.  Most people have older hard drives lying around that can profitably be recycled in a multi-bay NFS.

 

Also, buy a three quid 8GB USB stick and create a bootable pen drive for emergencies. If you don't use it you'll make a friend rescuing someone else with it.  The time to do all these things is NOW; it's human nature to put off until it is too late!  A failure will happen, it's simply a matter of when.