Joey Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 I'm pretty ticked right now. Bought a new touch screen Sony VAIO in October, so 3 months ago, and I have never had as many problems with a laptop in my life. Then today, it crashed - HARD. I had to call Sony Support as I could not do anything. He walked me through a complete Recovery, only the recovery was basically a "start fresh" and I lost EVERYTHING. All my photography and everything else I had on the computer. I voiced my discontent and he said that Windows 8, and running on Sony in particular, have had immense problems like this with it crashing the hard drive, but they have a "patch" now and it should fix it in the future. I said if you had a patch to fix this, why not send all Sony customers an email or some kind of info online somewhere, telling them that your hard drive might crash and patch it before it happens? He said he was only the "tech help" and it was not his problem. Nice customer service!!! Okay, rant over.
BillM Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 Windows 8 is horrible, if you can install Windows 7. Also, get a cheap $100 WD Passport and back up your photos. I do weekly incrementals and monthly full offsites (DVD burnt and put in my parents safety deposit box).
woodenboater Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 Before you do anything else, take it to a data recovery specialist and see if they can retrieve your files. I used CBL Data Recovery when my iMac pooched it. They're on Alden Rd in Markham, wouldn't hurt to have them look at it. and not that you probably wanna hear this now but I keep my photos stored on a couple of externals as well. These will have to be copied again at some point. good luck Joey
DRIFTER_016 Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 Windows 8 is terrible. I refuse to roll it out at work because it's such a pain. I didn't roll out Vista either. I have enough to do without having to deal with an OS that doesn't work or is terribly designed. And as said, pick up a USB hard drive to back your stuff up to.
Joey Posted January 4, 2014 Author Report Posted January 4, 2014 Thanks guys, going to do that tomorrow, get the external and probably take it in to see if someone can recover anything. When I went to buy the new laptop I tried very hard to get one with windows 7 and they only had a cheap small one left so I decided to try 8. Wish I had searched a bit harder now.
Dan668 Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 Windows 8.1 is fine for me. Just download a program like start 8 to bring it back to the looks of Windows 7. It still has a few quirks but operates quicker. What did you mean by crash hard? Would it not start period? Probably shouldn't have run recovery because unless it was automatically creating new restore points, it would've erased all data bringing it back to beginning. Should've of tried to recover the data first. Use a program/or bring it in though still as theirs a chance it can still be recovered. I know WD Passport are one of the best but I've had one fail on me in the past year. Were replaced by warranty. So backup in more than one place. The pictures i like i get printed.
Dan668 Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 Thanks guys, going to do that tomorrow, get the external and probably take it in to see if someone can recover anything. When I went to buy the new laptop I tried very hard to get one with windows 7 and they only had a cheap small one left so I decided to try 8. Wish I had searched a bit harder now. Pretty difficult to find one with windows 7. I tried also for my sister. Unfortunately a deal came up on a Lenovo that was too hard to pass up on. Installed Start 8, and now she doesn't even notice that its windows 8.
BillM Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 A lot of manufacturers have made Windows 7 drivers available on newer laptops due to Windows 8.. You could always do you own install, just make sure the drivers are available. I'm sure someone has had this problem with the same laptop...
danc Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 http://www.iobit.com/iobitstartmenu8.php Download this little gem and it gives you your start menu again. This was a life saver for me.
Joey Posted January 4, 2014 Author Report Posted January 4, 2014 Windows 8.1 is fine for me. Just download a program like start 8 to bring it back to the looks of Windows 7. It still has a few quirks but operates quicker. What did you mean by crash hard? Would it not start period? Probably shouldn't have run recovery because unless it was automatically creating new restore points, it would've erased all data bringing it back to beginning. Should've of tried to recover the data first. Use a program/or bring it in though still as theirs a chance it can still be recovered. I know WD Passport are one of the best but I've had one fail on me in the past year. Were replaced by warranty. So backup in more than one place. The pictures i like i get printed. Crashed hard means it would not start or open or do anything but show a blue screen with the only options being "recovery" or "restore" and then they would not even work. It just kept saying there was an error. I have tried all last month to install windows 8.1 and it won't install. I get an error and look up the error and Microsoft has not found a fix for that either as apparently alot of windows 8 user cannot download 8.1
danc Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 Windows 8 is a failed attempt by microsoft to compete with the apple system. Sorry. You snooze, you lose. I still like my windows based pc's and don't know if I'd ever buy a mac, but I'm having so much fun with my iphone (3 months now), that I'm on it more than my laptop or pc now.
Old Ironmaker Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 Joey I am so sorry you are going through this. You can recover your stuff, I don't know how but I'm sure they are able to. All your wonderful photos, don't say it's so. There are many sharp folks here that will help you out, I know someone will. I've had Windows8RT since it came out in November 2012. Really the only problem I've had was it non compatibility with any Apple apps. Such as our music IPod. We were sold a bill of goods as all I need this for is photos, music and internet. We have an Asus touch pad and it does what I need it to other than what we wanted it for. That's my rant. All will be fine girl. I think this a good reminder to all of us to back up, back up, back up. For a tool that is supposed to make our lives easier it seems it can just be another stressor we don't need. Even back in 2012 a week after 8 came out there wasn't much available with 7.
Big Cliff Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 Joey, I am so sorry to hear about your hard drive failure, ours crashed two years ago and we lost a lot of things that will never be recovered not to mention all the software that I lost. I talked to one of the "data recovery" companies and they told me it would cost about $1800.00 but there was no guarentee they could recover anything. I got a new hard drive installed in our computer and then went to Staples and bought an external hard drive and have set that up so it automatically backs up all my files. With all the tech savey people on this board I hope one of them will be able to help you get all your stuff back!
Raf Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 sorry to hear joey. windows 8 is poop if you ask me as well. not to kick a woman when she's down but this really highlights the need for some kind of backup / redundancy in your home network. i have a 2 drive raid-1 NAS (two drives that are clones of each other -- should one fail, i lose nothing. just pop a new one in and the data will duplicated onto it from the remaining good drive) and also back that up to an external HD for storing offsite (my work desk). we store everything important on that NAS. nothing important gets stored on the PCs.
Joey Posted January 4, 2014 Author Report Posted January 4, 2014 Well thanks guys, I guess I'm off to the store for some back up drives today. A hard lesson learned for sure. Sony sent me a "customer satisfaction questionnaire" this morning by email after my call to customer support last night. I wonder how they'll react to the responses I left on it
John Bacon Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 I too got stuck with Windows 8 because I bought a new laptop this summer. I think it is worse than Vista! I hear that Lenovo is still selling laptops with Windows 7. I suspect that other manufacturers will follow. There was a similar pattern with the VistaCrap OS. Virtually all businesses are still running Windows 7 (some are even running XP), so it is definitely available.
BillM Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 Joey if the drive didn't physically fail and it was just a windows problem, you should have no issues getting your pictures off of it. Did you already do a complete format/re-install?
lew Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 It'd be a shame if you lost some pictures Joey, hope you get everything straightened out OK and can get them back.
pics Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 There should be a free cloud storage on the new computers. That combined with an external hard drive should spare you pain in the future.. I'm still trying to learn windows 8 and it can be frustrating...
OhioFisherman Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 I got a new desktop last year, sadly the choices seemed limited locally to windows 8. I think it was designed to make people long for the good old days of XP or windows 7.
ketchenany Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 Sorry for your loss. Always been in a MAC invironment and never had one crash. I run Microsoft Word EXL PowerPoint and use the email that comes with it. On my MAC. Since I got my digital I just unload the card to a computer file/CD . . . Then I save the card and just go and buy another. For back up I just got a 1TB external and manually back up when I want to. Pixtures are always in three or four places. I also have ICloud if I want to use it with my iPad.
Handlebarz Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 Dang sorry to hear that Joey you for sure has many great pictures on there.
BillM Posted January 4, 2014 Report Posted January 4, 2014 Joey, another good reason to have a Flickr account as well, or Dropbox/Skydrive.
Bitsmith2k Posted January 7, 2014 Report Posted January 7, 2014 there are downgrade rights from windows 8 -> 7, so you can still run 7 if you wanted
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