My computer is dead and I have questions. Can you help?

Question

To dispell the obvious first question, I'm writing from someone else's computer.

My computer died after I did several updates all in one day so I don't know which it was. I updated Norton, Office, and Yahoo IM. But the real question isn't which did it.

It won't boot AT ALL. It does a beep sequence (5,1,2,3) and the lights in the back (YYGG) both indicate a memory R/W error. It is a Dell Dimension 8200 if that is important. I pulled and reseated the memory and have tried all sorts of other things (unplugging and waiting before I plug back in, etc).

First off, is there any reason to believe that investing in new memory modules would solve this problem? I wonder if something else caused them to fail and it would do the same to new ones.

Next, do you think the information on my hard drive can be saved? I know, I should've backed it up, 20/20 hindsight. Can it be hooked up to another computer as a slave to pull the my documents folder onto CDrom?

Any other ideas or comments?

Answer 1

Your documents and files on your HD will be ok. Try some new memory. There's a good chance that is the problem. I don't think doing updates to your computer caused this since the problems are occurring even before Windows has a change to boot.

Answer 2

If you have 2 memories in your motherboard or more, how about removing all of them, leaving one at a time to see if your PC opens properly, if it’s the memory, you will know that the one that is defected won’t work.
I had a similar problem a couple months ago with updates, and somehow had to reinstall Windows from scratch since I couldn’t recuperate anything because of some hard drive number in registries, serial numbers, etc.
You can try to bring your hard drive to another PC as a slave, recuperate your info, if that is the case; at least you know it isn’t the hard drive that is defected.
Apart from that, anything is possible.

Answer 3

After each update I personally would reboot the PC to allow the updates to populate on the PC. It sounds like your Hard drive may have failed. You can take the drive out of the PC and install it as a slave just to copy your important files. I don't think your memory failed. I think your hard drive did not like the updates from one or all of the applications you were updating. Hope this helps.