My Dell 8250 has had a couple of wierd problems in the past week. Audio would not play through Windows Media but would play with Jukebox. All of a sudden I could not acess my Yahoo mail account and the error message said that I was not accepting cookies and needed to enable them. I did not change anything that would cause this so after a few days of this I figured that some nasty website changed some settings and tried to do a system restore. Got up....came back a couple of hours later and my computer is dead. Here is what I have done so far.
Booted to every "mode" I possibly can.....safe mode brings me to the screen that has all the numbers and drivers on it and stops dead. I sometimes hear a faintish noise that sounds like a jet taking off.
Called Dell Support....for about 3 hours. The guy had me do things (skndsk /r etc) that took so long he told me he would call me back. (Twice). He was reading from a book. He also had me power off, disconnect everything except monitor, keyboard and mouse....power up. Power off, disconnect plug from wall and hold button in to release stored electricity. He had me do something on startup with the "F" buttons that supposedly restored something to factory settings. Four lights in back are one....no light is illuminated in the front. I have run Dells Diagnostics and it is not finding anything wrong. Nothing is helping. He says the next step is to reformat and actually gave me 2 phones numbers of businesses that might be able to save my "stuff". The first one I called said $1500 - are they kidding me?
I do not want to lose my stuff....I am not a business but a home user that (like all of us) has "stuff" they do not want to lose....small video clips, photographs, my "favorites" ( a ton of them), ebay's turbolister alone has so much time intensive information stored on it that the thought of losing it all is making me lose my mind.
The system is not even 2 years old and I purchased the extended warranty so I am good until 2/06. Can anyone think of anything that will help me. I would love to speak to an actual Dell TECHNICIAN....I honestly dont even care about the fact that my warranty will cover a new harddrive if this one is unfixable. I never in a million years thought that I needed to back-up all this stuff....like I said the system is not even 2 years old and I have never had a problem with it until this past week.
Help please.
Booted to every "mode" I possibly can.....safe mode brings me to the screen that has all the numbers and drivers on it and stops dead. I sometimes hear a faintish noise that sounds like a jet taking off.
Called Dell Support....for about 3 hours. The guy had me do things (skndsk /r etc) that took so long he told me he would call me back. (Twice). He was reading from a book. He also had me power off, disconnect everything except monitor, keyboard and mouse....power up. Power off, disconnect plug from wall and hold button in to release stored electricity. He had me do something on startup with the "F" buttons that supposedly restored something to factory settings. Four lights in back are one....no light is illuminated in the front. I have run Dells Diagnostics and it is not finding anything wrong. Nothing is helping. He says the next step is to reformat and actually gave me 2 phones numbers of businesses that might be able to save my "stuff". The first one I called said $1500 - are they kidding me?
I do not want to lose my stuff....I am not a business but a home user that (like all of us) has "stuff" they do not want to lose....small video clips, photographs, my "favorites" ( a ton of them), ebay's turbolister alone has so much time intensive information stored on it that the thought of losing it all is making me lose my mind.
The system is not even 2 years old and I purchased the extended warranty so I am good until 2/06. Can anyone think of anything that will help me. I would love to speak to an actual Dell TECHNICIAN....I honestly dont even care about the fact that my warranty will cover a new harddrive if this one is unfixable. I never in a million years thought that I needed to back-up all this stuff....like I said the system is not even 2 years old and I have never had a problem with it until this past week.
Help please.
