ugh Teenagers

So....
I use mac OS, and I backup often.
However my teenage stepdaughter uses vista and never backs up. You can warn them but...
She has had some kind of system meltdown and the computer (Dell Inspiron 1525) gets to the desktop and restarts. It says it has shutdown to avoid damage to the computer.
Now I thought, meh....I'll reinstall over her stuff and then she'll learn the way I did years ago... the hard way, but alas I am a sucker for a pretty face.
Anyway, how can I get her files off? Safe mode? How? Can't burn discs in safe mode so...
:cry(

 

:wave Welcome to Major Geeks! :major

There's a few ways to handle this: you can use a USB flash drive (thumb drive) if you plug it in before booting in Safe Mode. Then drag-n-drop the files to it. You can use a boot CD and once it's booted, you can remove the CD and then burn stuff to a CD/DVD; if you have 2 CD drives on a tower PC then you can do the same thing but you wouldn't be limited by having to use a boot CD that loads into memory; you could use one that runs from the CD, since you didn't mention if the Dell is a laptop or tower (unless I missed it rolleyes ) I'm not sure of which way you'd need to go, so I included all possibilities. Anyway, here's some boot discs that should come in handy:
http://majorgeeks.com/UBCD4Win_d5710.html (read this link for the How-To-Build-The-CD Guide)
http://www.livecd.com/ (I think the free demo download will do what you need it to)
http://www.knoppix.com (a Linux distro that runs entirely from a bootable CD)
So, you can insert your USB flash/external drive then boot to any of the above CDs and copy your data over, or if you have 2 CD drives (and one is a burner) you can burn your data to a disc. The Active@ disc (the 2nd link) will load entirely in to the system memory so the disc can be removed, this way you can pop a blank in the drive and burn your files.
Good luck! I hope this helps!

[dlb]