HELP!! I can't pull up my documents!!

[kmaster224]

Hi,

My son suggested that I try this site for help with my current problem. I have a Dell XPS M1530 laptop with 4 gigs of RAM. In the past, I never had any problem with my documents. I am a teacher, so the majority of my documents are either Word, PPT, or Adobe PDF. I love to search fro resources, and am involved on various committees at our school, so I have a lot of data in these files.

Lately any time I click on a document it takes forever to come up, if at all. Often the program being used stops responding. Sometimes I have given up and moved on to something else and the document pops up on my screen!

I may be imagining things, but the problems seemed to have started about a month ago. I have a desktop at home which i was using to create a powerpoint for a staff meeting. The document was almost finished, and was saved on the desktop. One night we had a huge lightning storm that knocked out our phone lines, including our router, modem, and my desktop's PSU and fried the internet adapter. Then we replaced the PSU and moved everything onto an external hard drive which I use to transport files to and from school. Ever since then this has been happening.

At the staff meeting, I couldn't get the powerpoint to open on my laptop, so I tried a friends. That gave her computer the blue screen of death. So I didn't even get it to work. Later our comp tech looked at it, and it shut down her computer also. So I have no idea what to do. I have even had to retype this because my computer had frozen up.

So anyway, any help would be appreciated. Thank you very much

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hi there,

The power outage/surge is the probable cause and may have damaged the MB chips or corrupted files. You describe a problem on you laptop (freezing up) and the ext HDD causing corruption. Other thing to consider is a virus, although less likely. Run a full antivirus scan on your computer HDD, then on the external HDD to make sure they are clean.

Next thing to do is run the Dell Diagnostics built into the computer - Info in the manual. That will tell you if the laptop resources are OK or if there is a hardware problem.

To check the external drive, download the free version of HD Tune on your friends computer, and after connecting the external drive, see if there is any problem with the disk itself. Program is free, and although it's a great applet to have, if you don't want to keep it, you can just delete it when done.