Wolf

So besides a hard drive that is dead the optical drive also does not work. Do yourself a favour AFC and toss the lappy in the nearest skip. To my mind it's pointless investing money in it.

This could be anything from a knackered hard drive, bad memory, a faulty GPU on the board or even the board its self. Do you get any other signs of life from this lappy at all?

Have you tried booting into Safe Mode by tapping F8 immediately on start up?

You say this is an old machine, do you know what amount of memory the board will support? If not then run a scan from Crucial and it will tell what it will support. http://www.crucial.com/systemscanner/?click=true

The hard drive is down the toilet mate. I suggest you obtain a new one, do you have your operating system disk to hand?

What!!!! Doing so would be madness as it would create electrical static unless using a battery powered vacuum. The very nature of a can of compressed air means that it is under pressure and the force of spraying the air will eliminate all instances of dust especially in confined areas.

Hi Remilia Welcome to FPCH I would have to agree that the board is faulty if you know for a fact that the memory is fine.

Have you tried reseating the hard drive yet?

I'm with Virgin and I had exactly the same model of modem which is just a stand alone modem Starbuck before a kind person sent me a stand alone router, I then hooked the two together. Now I'm on Virgin's 30MB package I have a modem/router combo.

Today I could not find the thing that peels the carrots and potatoes so I asked the kids if they'd seen it. They said She left two days ago Dad

If your tower is fairly modern then the main drive will be a SATA connection but what I need to know is if you have any IDE connectors on the motherboard. If you do then do you have a length of IDE ribbon cable to connect the drive? I'm just trying to save you money buy not buying the item I mentioned earlier when it could be a waste if the drive is totally dead.

Do you have a laptop or a desktop (tower) unit Laura?

No mate as all you are doing is re-seating it. To my mind however the problem lies here with the internal PSU or the CPU and fan assembly. Just how old is this laptop?

What you could do is try to connect the hard either internally or via USB to another machine to check the integrity of the drive, ie, if it at least seen. It would then be regarded as a non primary (system) drive and if it is not detected or if any files on it are not detected then the drive is dead.

Have a read of this Mike, forget the fact that it has a WebSTAR label on the front of the modem as these are very popular modems. http://www.simplehelp.net/2006/07/17/cable-modem-troubleshooting-scientific-atlanta-dpc2100/ What package do you have with Virgin with regard to the Internet? My thoughts would be 10MB.