Blog 55

A couple of weeks ago I received a panic phone call from S, eldest grandson. His best friend J's laptop was not functioning, it was presenting the dreaded "Blue Screen of Death" read here what this dreaded screen is.

The plea "Granddad can you have a look at the laptop" the concern was that some important projects were stored there and the second plea was can you get it, the laptop, going again so the data can be rescued.

The first job was to get the hard disc drive out of the laptop, this was easily done on this one by removing a blanking plate on the underside of the computer, I placed the drive in a caddy then attached it via USB cable to M's desktop computer which I was rebuilding at the time. The desktop computer wouldn't recognise the disc and during this operation M's computer froze. Not good. Dig out the BootPE disc. Anyway to foreshorten a long story the data was recovered, over 4GB which was written to DVD. The disc was formatted and placed back into the laptop.

Grandson took over at the point and installed Windows XP and copied the data back on to the laptop.

The reason for the photograph is that J and his parents were so grateful for what I and S had done they rewarded me with these items. I believe S chose chocolate. I was initially asked what is my favourite chocolate and since I no longer eat chocolate I suggested that they don't buy anything. However push came to shove and I chose these two items.

The text inside the card written by J "To S's Grandad, thank you for fixing my laptop I am very grateful. From J (S's friend). P.S. I hope you like the sweets."