The Great Desktop PC Death Catastrophe! [PC]

Image "Out of Order" courtesy of Dan

Cut down in its prime, my PC has bitten the dust. It had been quite unwell for around a week, but has now lead to a nasty error message and constant crashing BEFORE Windows log-in. Oh poo. I know.

So here's how it was: I was razzing it up on Dawn of War II and having a majorly great time of it - so much so that I had about 50 screen shots ready to pack a review out with! - when things got very slow. The game reduced to a glitchy halting standstill and from then on: zip.

Obviously it goes without saying that the spate of PC game reviews I intended to write will have to be postponed until the crisis is resolved (that is: ANNO 1404, Dawn of War II & Chaos Rising, and some other Steam titles).

Now I have very little experience in the repairs/major maintenance-side of computers and so have had to read around on a few websites to find the general consensus to be "Oh bugger, you'd better save up some money". I am completely at a loss as to how to proceed.

So where do I go from here, friends and members of the public? How do I save/recover the stuff on my hard drive and what is the most cost-effective/best way to get me back up and gaming quickly?

Here are all the techy details on the PC:

• Seagate ST3250310AS 250GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 8MB Cache
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Socket AM2 2.6GHz Energy Efficient L2 1MB (2x512KB) Cache
• OCZ 2GB DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 CL 5-6-6-15 Value Series Memory
• ASUS M3A78-CM 780V Socket AM2+ onboard graphics 8 channel audio mATX Motherboard 
• Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

The machine will turn on - display advanced/BIOS settings pages - but will crash whenever you try to boot Windows. Safe mode etc. do not work, and nor does the memory error fix thingy that Windows tries - this just crashes in the middle of the process.

Any help you can offer would give a PC gamer back his gaming freedom, and give a reviewer access to his source materials. Please comment with any help / advice / suggestions. Thank you.

Image on this page is copyright of dan and can be found at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/Computers_g62-Out_Of_Order_p30002.html