Besides making sure my data is all backed up because it’ll be going bye-bye. I’m using a free trial of Carbonite to back up all my files now. It’s 96% completed after two days. I also backed up the most critical files a second time onto a 16 gb flash drive. I can re-download Office programs using my university’s campus agreement with Microsoft.
I’m doing this because I’m at the end of my rope on fixing what ails my machine. It’s had more random BSODs in the last few weeks than ever before, and it no longer will hibernate or go into standby either manually or by closing the cover. Malware, spyware, and virus checks show no problem. Drivers are updated.
So, anything else to consider before I go all Old-Testament “let’s start over” on this laptop?
Just out of curiosity, what version of Windows? (I ask because my Inspiron came with Windows ME, which was a POS and crashed regularly. I replaced it with Win2K not long after buying the machine. But I’m guessing yours isn’t that old.)
You might want to go to the Dell support site for your machine and download every driver you can get your hands on. Put them on a CD or a thumb drive. Then if anything is missing once you get the OS back on, you can quickly get them loaded.
As a addition to ZipperJJ’s excellent advice, consider downloading any Intel drivers directly from Intel instead of Dell. When I had some problems with my Dell, I saw advice from a number of techie forums to get the drivers directly from Intel - apparently some code or something that Dell added made something not work properly, and the Intel ones didn’t have this flaw.
I assume you’re just going to restore using Dell’s hidden partition on the hard drive. I did that not long ago (also XP Pro) and it was a snap. Only small snag I had was in restoring my iTunes folder. Yes, you can just backup the whole folder (in My Music) and copy it back after restoration, but make sure you restore the same version of iTunes. A more recent version of iTunes may not read a folder from an earlier version. So you can first update iTunes to the latest version and restore everything to that version, or you can find a setup program for the earlier version of iTunes to reinstall post-restore. Other than that, it was quite pleasing to have a clean machine after the restore.
I tried that a couple of times, and both times got a BSOD, and hence the beginning of those problems. That was one of the remedies that I found when searching for my original problem of not being able to put my laptop in standby or hibernate.
A five year old notebook will often (almost invariably) have a pretty sizeable accumulation of dust blocking cooling vents and coating internal components which can cause serious heat related issues including BSODs. I’d buy a can of pressurized air and blow out as much dust as possible before doing the re-install. If you can open the notebook case to get at the vents directly all the better. If not just blow it into the air vents. Stand back a bit as dust will explode out toward you.
I’d also try going back to a restore point before the BSODs started happening. I’ve saved some other computers that way. If that doesn’t fix it, then you might have to start thinking about a hardware problem.
