My ancient old Dell with the dodgy keyboard has finally died.
I'm currently typing on an even older laptop (once I'd recovered my password) which is held together with sticky tape. If you've sent me anything recently, I've lost it...

(Must buy a new computer...)

W

Sorry to hear the sad news, willobie. That happened to me last year, and it's very frustrating. I've since managed to get my stuff saved from it, but I had a few weeks where I thought I'd lost everything.

Oooh! How did you do that? I have most of the really important stuff backed up but I've lost no end of other stuff - including my address book...

It depends what's wrong with it. I paid a man £75 who said it needed a new motherboard and it would be very expensive. So I bought a new computer (desktop) which cost less than the motherboard would have done. Then, because the laptop had been written off, my husband decided he would play around with it, and found that the problem had been caused by the additional memory he had installed so I could run Sibelius. He removed the extra memory, and it worked again!

Lucky you! I suspect mine really is the motherboard (but could be the hard drive itself...) - certainly not worth repairing (given all its other little problems).

W

I don't know if this is possible with laptops (no reason why it shouldn't be though), but when my computer died I took the hard drive out and connected it to my new computer, recovering the files from the old computer. It does depend on what part has died. What happens when you try and boot it up?

The power light comes on, the hard drive gives a slight twitch and the whole thing switches off

That sounds like mine did.

Oh dear. That sounds pretty terminal to me. Your best bet is probably to take the hard drive out and connect it to another computer as a slave drive, alongside the one already in there. Then you might be able to recover all your files etc. It sounds like the hard drive could be fine, so its worth a try if you can!