I booted from a Linux CD and copied everything to an external hard drive, then took it to a local shop where the tech recognized it as a state he had seen before. It looks like over the weekend, an update for Steam arrived, but was corrupted -- this is the only computer I have Steam installed on, and in fact I never actually use it. So he will uninstall Steam, and run diagnostics to determine whether that fixes the problem -- with any luck, I'll have my working machine back by the weekend! In the meantime, I fired up my wife's lsptop of roughly similar specs. (Gateway rather than Acer, since its screen seemed to be a bit brighter....) The built-in wifi adapter on that laptop seems to have died, but I added an Edimax USB-Wifi dongle and got it working pretty quickly. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] Win10 BSOD From: Mark Rode <[log in to unmask]> Date: Wed, October 21, 2015 10:36 am To: [log in to unmask] The first thing I would determine is if the hard drive checks out OK with a diagnostic program that should be available from the drives manufacturer. Usually boot off a CD and run the diagnostic. If the drive is OK then I would run Memtest to maker sure the RAM is OK. RAM is usually the problem with a BSOD. If RAM is Ok I would try to boot off a USB drive that gets you into Linux or Windows so you can retrieve your data. I know you to be a Linux expert so you can pick your distro to do this. Windows you can use Active Boot Disk http://lsoft.net/store.aspx to do this. Expensive but it will do what you want. m At 09:58 AM 10/20/2015, you wrote: > Is there anything I should try before asking a local Laptop > Repair shop to see if they can at least save my data? David Gillett > > PCSOFT's List Owners: Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]> Mark Rode<[log in to unmask]> PCSOFT's List Owners: Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]> Mark Rode<[log in to unmask]>