Serious Problem With Desktop - Help Required!

[Lie-in King]

Hi guys - I'm posting from my laptop because my desktop is seemingly dead!

I've a Hewlett Packard Pavilion p6-2388ea that died on me about 3 hours ago. The PC's description is the best I can give, I don't remember its "model name" - if it has one. It's running Win 8, has 8GB of RAM (I think), with a 1TB hard drive. I managed to get the "model number" as above by hitting F8 to try & access safe mode & finding "System Information" - there is no sign of the "Safe Mode" option, btw.

All I had open was Google, Outlook (Hotmail) & Skype, when I got blue circles of doom on everything & was unable to open Task Manager.

I turned everything off at the wall, waited 5 minutes, powered-up again & got a completely blank screen.

F8 & "Hard Disk Test" got me the following info -

"Hard Disk Short DST: Failed
Failure ID: 9e5pvs-00076e-x87tok-60ud03 (I didn't think to note if they're 0's or o's, sorry).

My last attempt to start-up (with F8) gave me -

"1720-SMART Hard Drive detects imminent failure"

Now I'm guessing that's not a good thing!

Have been on phone to HP, who were as much use as a chocolate fireguard - £202 to have them collect & repair, £35 just to speak to a techie, with no guaranteed result.

Does anyone think there's anything else to try, or do I just suck up the repair bill?

As always, thank you for your time & attention :-)

[HansUrbancka]

I think I would have purchased a Computer/Laptop which was loaded with Windows 7 and completely avoided W 8 & W8.1

Guess I am behind the times.

Hans.