It Had To Happen One Day

[clean_as_a_squid]

After running Windows 7 for many years, tonight I had the blue screen unexpected shut down for the first time. I'd just started to run MediaMonkey when the first indication that something was going o happen when I had a message saying "couldn't delete a certain file". I thought nothing of it and clicked on OK. The second thing that drew my attention was the task bar had changed color.

It did that a few days ago, after it happened I just restarted the computer and the task bar was back to black. It was when I was in the process of restating the computer that I had the blue screen of death. Like the fool I am I took no notice of what the text was telling me and went ahead with the restart.

As soon as my computer was running I went looking for info about unexpected shutdowns. Normally I prefer to watch videos on YouTube on how to solve problems like this. All I could find was silent videos showing what to do or those with a voice spoke in a foreign language.

Although I'm familiar with computers, I can partition disc drives and do a complete installation etc,  from the videos I've seen I'd rather not touch anything inside the case.  In layman's terms could someone please advise me on the options I need to take should the same thing happen again. 

TNX

[Geek-9pm]

You already have another computer, - Right?
First step is to get cloud storage to save anything important. You might have to wipe the hard drive and install everything again.
Look here:
The free version of Google Drive entitles you to 15 GB of storage; you can up this to 100 GB of storage for $1.99/month, or 1 TB for $9.99/month (same pricing/storage as Dropbox Pro).Oct 29, 2018

If you get i fixed inside two months, price is worth while.

[Lisa_maree]

Hi
First off how much free space do you have on your C Drive. If it is less than say 20gb then you will need to free up more space.
Does the computer seem slower or is the hard drive making any different sounds like fans surging or un usual clicking from the hard drive.
If you can keep the computer running and load a program called speccy from here   https://www.ccleaner.com/speccy/download
Select File, publish report  and copy the url to the report in your next post. This will give pages of very helpful information.

[clean_as_a_squid]

Hi
First off how much free space do you have on your C Drive. If it is less than say 20gb then you will need to free up more space.
Does the computer seem slower or is the hard drive making any different sounds like fans surging or un usual clicking from the hard drive.
If you can keep the computer running and load a program called speccy from here   https://www.ccleaner.com/speccy/download
Select File, publish report  and copy the url to the report in your next post. This will give pages of very helpful information.

I have 402GB free space on my C drive. I keep all my data files on a partitioned external drive in case anything happens to my C drive.

The PC sounds to be working normally. It doesn't appear to be running slowly. The fans aren't surging and there is no clicking from the hard drive. I've just taken off the left side of the case and found the PSU case feels cool as do the heat sinks above the CPU and graphics card.

I'll look into downloading that App you mentioned.

[clean_as_a_squid]

You already have another computer, - Right?
First step is to get cloud storage to save anything important. You might have to wipe the hard drive and install everything again.
Look here:
The free version of Google Drive entitles you to 15 GB of storage; you can up this to 100 GB of storage for $1.99/month, or 1 TB for $9.99/month (same pricing/storage as Dropbox Pro).Oct 29, 2018

If you get i fixed inside two months, price is worth while.

As I've said in reply to Lisa_maree's post I store all my data files on a partitioned external drive in case anything happens on the C drive. I still have 225GB free space on the external drive. I also have everything backed up on DVDs. I usually do back ups twice a year. Anyway, I have a thing about giving my financial details on line no matter how secure the site is.

Thanks all the same.

[Lisa_maree]

Thank you for the reply I think it would be better to download HDsentinal from here first https://www.hdsentinel.com/download.php
and check the hard drive. You are doing good backing up well done. 

[Geek-9pm]

Some more HDD testing links:
https://www.computerhope.com/forum/index.php?topic=10888.0
Above post has ten links for Hard Drive testing stuff.

[Geek-9pm]

Some more HDD testing links:
https://www.computerhope.com/forum/index.php?topic=10888.0
Above post has ten links for Hard Drive testing stuff.

EDIT: Some links are broken, others are good.