"Dave Cornwell" wrote in message
...
Well it had to happen one day, hard drive failure. I must have seen it
coming although there were no signs from my trusty four year old home
built PC, as I had ordered a new one a few days earlier. It suddenly
wouldn't boot fully into Windows. Not overly concerned as the data on the
hard drive was probably ok at this point, I went through my usual recovery
tricks of XP repair, rescue disk ,booting from various Linux disks and so
on. Couldn't even get to restore through DOS or Safe mode. But they all
just continuously started up then powered down just before they got to the
Desktop. Now previously I had helped my daughter (they don't do backups do
they) recover data from a non-bootable HD by using an IDE to USB drive
converter - a brilliant idea that worked well. So I got out the same kit
and it fried my HD! I think the 12v power supply must have failed and put
out too much voltage. (I thought it might be worth mentioning to warn
people to be extra careful if they need to go down that route).
Now luckily I had backed up all of my images (20 gigs worth!) 3 days
before, My and my wife's Docs a few months before and emails seemed to be
still on the Virgin Server. So not the tragedy it could have been but as
you know- a big pain starting a new system up from scratch which brings me
on to my main point - Windows 7 !!
After reading some reviews that it was much better than Vista I thought it
was probably time to upgrade from my longstanding and sometimes
troublesome XP. How disappointed I was. My first reaction is that it is
less intuitive, dumbed down and has actually lost features like a calendar
and Outlook Express. The Windows LiveMail I am using here is so cluttered
and full of stuff it's very unfriendly. This brings me to a question that
has often been asked and which I have previously taken little heed of in
the past:-
What free email clients are any good? Simple is good as long as it deals
with Newsgroups.
Now to catch up with the weather - did someone mention cold while I was
away ;-)

Dave



Dave

How about taking the hard drive placing in a external case and trying it on
a lap top via the usb usual connection. Now if the problem is XP at least
the hard drive should still function as a storage device and thus all your
documents and personal stuff plus outlook emails ; can be recovered . You
can then either take the data off or buy a new hard drive and reinstall on
that and import all the email data from what was your original OS HD but now
a storage drive.

Does that make sense?