I??ve had two computers go down during the past year. Both aged about 6 years or so and used in the home. An HP desktop had a hard drive crash. The annoying and amusing thing was that I made a comment to someone about how nice it was functioning after going through some hurdles with the WIN10 upgrade. It didn??t handle the WIN10 upgrade well from WIN7. Some functions disappeared.
Then the Dell Inspiron laptop went kaput. It was a mid-price laptop for?ÿ family home/travel use and some business that I didn??t upgrade to WIN10.
It wouldn??t boot up. Only a dark screen with seven beeps emanating. Pause. Seven beeps. ad infinitum,
I found out that the seven beeps alert signified a motherboard failure. I checked out YouTube to find any repair vids for this particular Dell. Found a few for replacing motherboards but they were far ?ÿbeyond?ÿ my capabilities and too daunting to try. I was resigned to scrap the laptop when I saw one more video about the ??Seven Beeps of Death? posted by this bizarre person on YouTube. H suggested turning it on, wrapping the laptop in a blanket, letting it roast for about a half hour or so. Then boot up.
Well it works. Sometimes to varying time intervals, some days it will boot?ÿ without the blanket.
It has been functioning like this for 3-4 months. ?ÿI??m glad that I didn??t discard it to the other digital refuse accumulated here.
It has it's own nice little fleece blanket the family dog likes to share.
Just passing this along.?ÿ
I've had motherboard failure and was able to retreive the data from my hard drive using another computer.
There is "USB to SATA/IDE cable kit with its own power adapter that will attach to the hard drive and connect via USB?ÿ cable and open the files on another computer and costs less than $20
You sure it's motherboard? Frequently the "Beeping" is a sign of RAM failure.
In April of 2016 I bought a new Dell T7810 workstation ($2466 or so).?ÿ In December of 2016 it failed to boot one morning -- no POST beeps, no nothing.?ÿ Dell sent a tech who replaced the motherboard, but that didn't do any good.?ÿ He came back a few days later with another motherboard, same results.?ÿ Another visit and he replaced the CPU, but still no joy.?ÿ He basically shrugged his shoulders and left again.?ÿ Repeated chats, emails and phone calls to Dell Support didn't get me anywhere closer to a solution; they kept bumping the problem to a higher level of support staff, but all they kept offering was to send out a tech with a new motherboard.?ÿ Meanwhile I was without my main workstation, having reverted back to the Win7 machine that I had retired because it was getting too old to be reliable and had begun exhibiting some quirky behavior.?ÿ
Finally, I tweeted to the Dell Support account expressing my frustration.?ÿ I got a response the same day, and a day or so later they had ordered a replacement workstation (same model, slightly different components since some of the innards in the original were no longer in the Dell lineup).?ÿ Still, it took a couple of weeks before they built and shipped it to me, which made me nervous given the occasional flakiness of the old machine.?ÿ But the replacement has been running with nary a glitch ever since.
I lost two laptops in a power surge because I was just stupid enough to have them both plugged into the same ten year old $3.99 surge protector.
If there's a good bit of advice on that front, Tripplite is reportedly one of the best surge protectors on the market, and reasonably priced.
?ÿ
Still wondering if I can email MS and ask for a replacement Excel program for the one I lost on the laptop.
Like OP et al.
