Computer techie question...

Dave, if you don't mind - whats the make and model - no motherboard should ever do that, so i'd like to take it off my list of potential purchases!!!

Is it possible that the motherboard had been configured differently from the default in the store?

Well this is certainly an interesting thread.

On the original question, if a program is installed onto an external hard drive or USB key, there should be no problem at all. Most programs like to put settings in the Windows registry, so just because a program has been installed on an external device on one computer, doesn't mean the program will run if that external device is connected to another computer.

As for getting the files back from the web server, as has been said, the files are on the server, you just need to download them back to your computer. Then whatever program you use should be able to look at the site that you've just downloaded and you can work on it from there. Dreamweaver has a "Sites" option for this, I've not used Net Objects so I can't advise there.

I wouldn't recommend any Microsoft product for working on web pages, be it Word or Frontpage. As Chris said, these programs tend to put out web pages that can only be opened in Internet Explorer. Also, the "quality" of the HTML they produce is often questionable.

As a self employed IT consultant, I see an awful lot of PCs in people's homes and offices. Of the private clients, about 90% of my workload are PC World machines where the client has often been messed around by PC World, or found their advice or help to be somewhat questionable, or got fed up of paying out again and again for the same problem. I have a lot of sympathy for these clients as they often genuinely didn't know any better and thought they were getting a good deal until it went bad.

Colin - as has been suggested, you can buy an inexpensive enclosure (£15 delivered from eBuyer, for example) and put the old hard drive in it to retrieve your files. Just because Windows doesn't start doesn't mean the drive itself is damaged.

Dave - like others have said, I have never heard of a new mainboard formatting a hard drive just like that. There's no reason why any mainboard should do that. I checked with a couple of collegues "in the trade" and none of them have heard of it either, so I'd very much like to know what mainboard you used please!

railtechnician - There really is no reason why a laptop can't be used as a desktop replacement. I used a Dell Inspiron 5000e as a desktop machine for a year, then replaced it with an Inspiron 8100 which served well until last year when it was replaced with a MacBook Pro. I had a desktop machine in addition to these but they still saw a lot of often heavy use. My Mac gets lugged up and down the country when I'm on my travels. As long as suitable care is taken of the laptop, especially bearing in mind the hard drive - don't drop it, don't set it down heavily, don't make any sudden harsh movements, then it should last a good long while.

With a little TLC and foresight, there's no reason a laptop can't be used as a desktop.

And Fedora Core 9 is my distribution of choice, too.

While on the subject of hard drives... I've worked in data recovery over the last few years at an internationally known data recovery company, so have a little general advice. Avoid Seagate drives at the moment. They are as bad now as Maxtor were a few years ago. Drives made in Singapore and Thailand tend to fare a little better, but any Barracuda 7200.8, 7200.9 or 7200.10 still has a big failure rate. If you have a Mac, then especially be aware as there is a well known problem with Seagate drives supplied in MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops that randomly fail and cannot be recovered.

Best drives on the market (least seen in the recovery labs!) are Hitachis and Samsungs. The Samsung 500Gb, 750Gb and 1Tb drives are about as reliable as they get, as are the Hitachi drives of the same capacity. Lower size Hitachi drives are pretty good too.

External drives - get a decent enclosure that is properly ventilated, and put a decent drive in it. Be very wary of sealed enclosures. Hard drives do NOT like heat, so enclosures that have proper ventilation are worth the extra £. From experience I would recommend against ANY Lacie external drive from the last few years, especially the ones with more than one drive in. I've seen what happens when those go bad and it isn't pretty.

Every hard drive now has self monitoring that can tell you the condition of the discs; there is free software available (DiskCheckup from Passmark is one example) that can let you look at those statistics and show you the temperature of the drive, how many sectors have gone bad, that kinda thing.

Ooh, that was a little more than I was intending on typing!

BTW, Dave, that hosting offer we were talking about ages ago still stands if you're interested. I've moved servers since but I reckon it's still do-able.

The best way to copy and paste is not to copy the displayed page, but to copy the source. There is an option in Firefox's "View" menu called "Page source" (in IE it will be called the same or something similar, but I'm on the wrong computer to check) click this and the source will load in a separate window. From here you can copy and paste as normal.

Colin - does NetObjects have a source code editor of some sort, so you can play with the HTML if you want? If so, then Chris's idea of copying the entire source code of a page should work - create a new page in NetObjects, delete all its HTML so it's completely empty, then paste in the HTML.

Could be useful for future reference!

Interesting. So if you were going to reconstruct a more complicated page where you had the HTML only, you'd have to use Notepad, paste in the HTML, save it as an HTML or HTM file (same difference, just a different extension on the file name), then open it in NetObjects if you wanted to make any changes.

I should get hold of a copy of NetObjects, see what I reckon!

Backups are always good!