Computer Dying; Question

If I get my computer to start again, which is seeming unlikely, I'd love some advice. My computer has been ill lately. About 2 weeks ago it stopped loading. I was able to restore to a few days before that and I was good for over half a week.

Then it died again but was resurrected after doing "start up repair." Then a few days later it died again.

At this point I was able to restore again- the second time I tried. The first time I attempted to restore on this night it couldn't, it gave an error message. It tried start up repair and failed. It then asked restoring and worked.

It worked again until now. It's currently gone through start up repair a few times- I'm going to try restoring again if it gives me that option. It keeps going to the main start up screen and the. It flashes a blue screen and immediately shuts this to go to launch repair. So I can see that there is a blue screen message but there is no way I can read it.

So, if it starts up again I know I need to get my PC fixed somehow. Advice? I'm willing/think I need to go to a repair shop. I'm just not even sure how to describe what should be diagnosed- tho I guess with it being stuck at start up they might have a good idea of what to look at. Willing just to wipe the machine but can't see how to pull up that prompt.

Any help would be appreciated, though I imagine there is no help that could be provided at this point. I would have typed this out earlier but I was dreading typing so many stupid words about such a problem. Guess I got what I deserve in having to instead type all this out on my phone.

My real hope was that it would come bak up and there would be good advice about how to run a diagnostics myself (even though I failed to mention this). Yeah it's
Dead, so advice is needed. Ill just take it to the shop and see what happens.

A repair shop wouldn't be a bad idea for just diagnosing what's wrong if you don't know how to. If they find out whats wrong you might be able to fix it yourself if it's hardware related.

My wife isn't going to let me take it to a repair shop (she has some specific thoughts). I have continued to wrestle with my computer for the last couple of days. I have twice reformatted it.

In these cases it seems fine and has 70-80 windows updates it begins to download. This takes forever and 40 minutes or so into the process (with maybe one, maybe no downloads complete) it restarts- or tries to. At this point it typically keeps failing, going to start up repair, and never fully loads again.

I've all but given up on it. The two times I was able to reformat it worked for at least an hour or so until it stopped

The reason why I'm writing though is I can often (but not always) get to the blue screen where it gives me options such as start up and boot menu and whatnot. Any suggestion at this point in terms of- any place I can go from there to get an actual error message in order to possibly recover my PC.

Also, it always suprises me just how down I get when a PC dies. It's an obstacle from the things I enjoy and an oppressive reminder of the pay ceiling at my job.

Thanks for any feedback.

As an amendment- shockingly my computer got to its home screen- it loaded (this after I was getting prompts for a boot disc last night). More surprisingly is that there are only 3 important windows updates left- so despite all the flailing, it was slowly installing some of these updates.

New question: if it actually allows me to go online is there a recommendation for something I can download to diagnose my issue? I've used some files that spit internal PC out, and I know you have to be careful- so if it is working, any recommendations?

P.S. it's been installing this one update for at least 20 minutes now- worried all is still not well.

You may have a drive failing. Do you have another computer to download/burn stuff on? I can give you some ideas but I'd rather you not use the one that's dying because if it is a drive failure you'll want to stop using it as soon as possible so you can just use it to pull stuff off.

At the minimum I suggest a knoppix, livecd, bartpe or winpe type solution to boot from and possibly set up network so you can copy stuff off that you NEED to a working computer also on the network. After you get the stuff that can't be missed then start getting the stuff that would be nice to have and then try to get anything else.

I've already backed up everything essential and my computer is clean- nothing on it I've created.

I will look into knoppix, livecd, bartpe or winpe- I'm not familiar with any if these.

It's weird- I continue to alternate between it not loading at all and it being fine for 30min to a few hours before it attempts to restart. If I can get it work I will look at these solutions.

Also I got an error message this morning and this evening when my programs quit working. I took a pic on my phone and will attempt to post them to see if try help.

One other symptom, and I can't describe it, is I occasionally hear a whiny, whirring noise that sounds like something spinning or somewhat and goes from lower to higher pitch. I'm sure that is no help, but mentioning it anyway.

Not sure if the below broken image is because I am in my phone or because I'm doing it wrong, but below is a link (or maybe an image?) to one of the error messages I received earlier. Hopefully it will be of small bit of help.

IMAGE(http://pbckt.com/p3.uEKCIi)

Sounds a lot like a hard drive to me. Do you have another drive you can try? But before that also try swapping the sata cables and ports. A damaged cable can give erratic problems.

demonbox wrote:

I will look into knoppix, livecd, bartpe or winpe- I'm not familiar with any if these.

It's weird- I continue to alternate between it not loading at all and it being fine for 30min to a few hours before it attempts to

One other symptom, and I can't describe it, is I occasionally hear a whiny, whirring noise that sounds like something spinning or somewhat and goes from lower to higher pitch. I'm sure that is no help, but mentioning it anyway.

Knoppix is a linux distro that can boot and run off a CD (aka - LiveCD), bartpe/winpe are tools that help you boot into a windows environment independent of your Hard Drive.
These tools would let you isolate the Hard Drive by taking it out of the boot equation. (Running Diagnostic tools that are installed on the hard drive is like asking a patient to examine themselves, it's easy to miss something or inadvertently make it worse)
That said... it sounds to me like you are experiencing failing bearings on your drive.
The platters on a drive spin very fast, thousands of rotations a minute, and if the bearings are going out it introduces drag, which screws up the timing of the read-heads and also, in extreme cases, wobble. The whiney whirring noise is the drive spinning itself up and down, trying to read your data off of the platter, failing, and starting over again and again. Once that happens the disk is essentially dead. The friction of the failing bearings introduce extra heat, the extra heat causes the bearings to swell and introduce more friction which creates more heat. It is only a matter of time before the drive fails completely.... Unless it is something else creating the whirring whine and a bad cable is causing the data errors.

Thank you for the help. I wish I had asked for it earlier. I wasn't able to get anywhere near back to the starting page for days prior- it seemed the pattern of sometimes working had been lost. I abandoned hope and picked up a new machine. Next time I shall be more proactive in seeking assistance. Thanks again for all the helpful offerings.