Working on Windows PCs

FiestaRed

FiestaRed

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Mike
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After a Windows problem last week and having received my invoice today, I now know that labour costs roughly £45 an hour and replacement parts are not cheap.

With this in mind, and although I hope everything is fixed but you can't be too sure with Windows, if a similar problem happened again, I'd like to try and work on the PC myself. One of the staff at a local company was brilliant, he worked online moving files and sorting the problem. Then I had a replacement drive and an Acronis back up installed, none of which come cheaply. With help from others on the Acronis forum, I now feel confident that I can do a restore myself but its things like changing drives and basic PC stuff that I'd like to learn.

Are there any YT videos that would be helpful, get a book maybe or is there something similar? Any help or advice would be most welcomed.
 
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If it is a shop bought PC like Dell or whatever then there is a limited amount you can do.

Changing drives and ram are the easiest job and there are many youtube videos showing people do it.

For drives they are usually connected to 2 cables, a SATA cable and the other is a power cable.

They both can be pulled out carefully and then remove the drive from its caddy or enclosure.

The issues can come when you turn the PC on with a blank drive, it can be awkward but I have always improvised what to do or looked up what the screen is telling me and see how to sort it out.

Ex business PC`s are the worst to change drives on because you get a warning message saying something like, the PC does not support that format drive or something like that
 
Thanks for the help Caerus. All my PCs were built locally and the company helped with the spec knowing it's used for photography.

What I'd like to do is take out the new SSD drive and put the original one back in (both SSD and same size) and do an Acronis restore on the original drive. Mainly to see if I can do it but I would also have a spare drive that was "up to date".
 
Can I assume, since you have the old drive, that the computer problem was due to corrupted files not caused by a drive fault?
(If the old drive is in any way faulty, a restore, even if successful, may not boot correctly, if at all.)

Also, do you have a CD/DVD/USB stick to initialize the Acronis restore software? I'm guessing it's not installed on the old drive, so you'll need something to kick it off once the drives are swapped.

Finally, if your case has room, don't bother removing the new drive, just slide the old one in above/below it and move the leads over. You can nick one screw from the new drive to hold it steady if you don't have any spares.
 
Thanks Tori_T, I wish I had your confidence.

The original problem was a corrupt user profile in Windows 10. Still with the old drive in place, the local company created a new profile and copied the files over which worked to an extent but I was having problems with Lightroom locating my images and had lost a couple of odd little files. In the end, and as Acronis had taken a back up the previous evening, I opted for a new drive and let them restore the back up to that. I do have a USB with the Acronis boot media on it but I wasn't brave enough to try the restore for myself.

Not sure if the case has room for an extra drive but it's certainly a good suggestion so I'll take a look. I no longer have an anti static wrist strap so I really ought to get one of those before I start poking my fingers into the case.
 
Win 10 and Win 7 have a backup and restore facility in the control panel.

You need first to create a Restore Disk and then the disk images needed for a complete restore.

I always use this facility on any PCs I buy which have an OS already installed.

You just need a few good quality DVDs, or, if doing the restore immediately a HDD to install the files on.

You can also shrink the OS prior to doing that in case you ever want to change the size of the disk you restore to.
 
Thanks for the reply Peter. I already use and with the recent restore working very well am very happy with Acronis as my back up software. I appreciate it's an added cost but it is saved to an external drive and easy to get at if problems arise.
 
I'm not clear from the above whether you're just using Acronis to back up you system (Windows) files, or whether you are also using it for your data, including your photographs.

Whatever backup regime you are using, you really do need to keep one recent copy of your data at a geographically separate location. There are a whole host of scenarios (theft, fire, floods, etc) which could affect all copies held locally. You can get a 5Tb external hard drive for well under £100 these days - I have 3 external drives with copies of my data, at least one of which is always in a different location. (They are also encrypted for security/privacy).

While the cloud may be one solution, I'm always wary of entrusting my important data to "somebody else's computer".
 
Thanks for the reply Philip.

Acronis True Image backs up my whole PC including any photos that are currently on my C:/ drive. The vast majority of my photos are moved to a separate HDD that's in the same PC case but that is not backed up by Acronis. This is copied daily to two external 1TB drives, although all are in the same building.
 
Thanks for the clarification.

As mentioned above, I'd really encourage you to keep one of those external drives somewhere else. If something bad did happen, it's easy enough to get a new PC and a copy of Windows, but our photograph collections are irreplaceable.
 
I use Acronis for an Image backup of my C: drive. Problems tend to come I clusters so I may have many years of not needing to restore but then suddenly there is a problem. If you have never used Acronis before it can be a little worrying as to whether it will work. Many years ago my PC developed a faulty HDD which was not obvious at first but I lost the ability to boot up so did my first Acronis restore which worked fine. After that I had to restore several times before recognising the disk fault and replacing it. Last year I had a W10 upgrade that rendered my PC virtually unusable. Again Acronis restore worked fine and I eventually discovered a rogue app which was stealing most of the RAM. Once deleted all was well.

Dave
 
All files and documents on external drive and just reinstall the apps and system from scratch if it really goes bad. This applies for all systems and not only windows. Don't keep important things on system drive.
 
Dave Canon said:
I use Acronis for an Image backup of my C: drive. Problems tend to come I clusters so I may have many years of not needing to restore but then suddenly there is a problem. If you have never used Acronis before it can be a little worrying as to whether it will work. Many years ago my PC developed a faulty HDD which was not obvious at first but I lost the ability to boot up so did my first Acronis restore which worked fine. After that I had to restore several times before recognising the disk fault and replacing it. Last year I had a W10 upgrade that rendered my PC virtually unusable. Again Acronis restore worked fine and I eventually discovered a rogue app which was stealing most of the RAM. Once deleted all was well.

Dave
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Thanks for the reply Dave, been really pleased with the Acronis restore. Only problem was that I was afraid to do it for myself in case I made a real cock up. At my request, the local company put in a new drive (same as the one that was in there) and did the restore to that. Now, having a spare drive, I'd like to swop the drives back over and do another restore to the spare one, mainly to see if I can do it myself.
 
Mike, having IT/Science background does possibly mean I am more confident in dealing with these issues but I am gradually losing touch with these skills given that I have not actually worked in IT for many years. I am struggling with a odd intermittent WiFi issue at home and it may take some time to diagnose. It is hard for any of us to keep on top of all of the new technology.

Dave
 
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