� Excessive heat or cold
� Excessive dust buildup on the PC parts,
� Magnetism interference;
� Viruses, Spywares, Malwares either downloaded from the Internet, shared via email or from storage media shared between different computers;
� Static electricity shocks or power surges;
� Spilling liquids onto the PC
� bumping or dropping the PC
� Wrong or forceful insertion/ removal of hardware
� Wrong hardware driver installed
� Outdated or faulty hardware

• Do not place a PC directly near a heating or cooling source. Excessive temperatures can damage a PC.
• Do not connect power sources directly into wall outlets but connect them to a surge protector which prevent and protect the PC from electrical surges.
• Be extremely careful when moving a PC from one location to another. Even small jolts can dislodge chips and expansion boards.
• Always keep a set of rescue disks for the operating system.
• Keep a copy of original software, on CD and keep it handy.
• Compress your hard drive may lead to corruption of data so if possible avoid compressing you harddrive.
• Make backup copies of important data and file on a CD, DVD or removable drives.

If you come about to have both Macs and PC (or a Mac and a PC), you can also connect them together in a network, although there are a few other considerations to bear in mind. It is highly recommended to install additional software either on the Mac or the PC. This will help for communicating clearly.

I have to admit, I haven’t cleaned my keyboard since I opened the box. No, don’t ask me how many months ago that was—it’s in years.

After reading this article I got scared pretty quick.

A desk is capable of supporting 10 million microbes and the average office contains 20,961 microbes per square inch, according to research.

The key offenders are telephones, which harbour up to 25,127 microbes per square inch, keyboards 3,295 and computer mice 1,676.

By contrast, the average toilet seat contains 49 microbes per square inch, the survey showed.

Immediately I googled the web like crazy until someone was able to show me how to PROPERLY clean my keyboard (that is if I ever bother to clean it at all). What? You thought your keyboard was self-cleaning? Time to get on your knees boy and start some scrubbing. Read this article

Did one of your hardwares suddenly fail? I’ve experienced a lot of hardware crash in the past. I remember one time, my personal computer would boot but the monitor is black. I checked the monitor but it is working perfectly. What I did is open up the CPU and inspected my video card. Upon opening the CPU, I noticed the great amount of dust inside it. If this happened to you too, here are some things you could do:

• Remove your hardware from the motherboard. Get a pencil eraser and run it through the tip connecting the hardware to your motherboard (the golden thing).
• Clean the inside of your CPU with a brush and a vacuum cleaner. Just be careful.

After doing the above, my video card worked again perfectly.

Image source: www.pcextreme.net

It’s not only start-up that you’d like to speed up; you can also make sure that your system shuts down faster. If shutting down XP takes what seems to be an inordinate amount of time, here are a couple of steps you can take to speed up the shutdown process:

Don’t have XP clear your paging file at shutdown. For security reasons, you can have XP clear your paging file (pagefile.sys) of its contents whenever you shut down. Your paging file is used to store temporary files and data, but when your system shuts down, information stays in the file. Some people prefer to have the paging file cleared at shutdown because sensitive information such as unencrypted passwords sometimes ends up in the file. However, clearing the paging file can slow shutdown times significantly, so if extreme security isn’t a high priority, you might not want to clear it. To shut down XP without clearing your paging file, run the Registry Editor (click Start > Run, then type regedit in the Run box) and go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

Change the value of ClearPageFileAtShutdown to 0. Close the Registry, and restart your computer. Whenever you turn off XP from now on, the paging file won’t be cleared, and you should be able to shut down more quickly.

Note: Please be careful when editing the Registry; you can do a lot of damage here. Don’t change or delete anything unless you know exactly what it is.

Source

If you are running out of space on your hard disk and your personal computer is slowing down, you might want to consider cleaning your computer’s hard disk thoroughly. No, you don’t have to actually reformat your hard disk. Let me introduce to you CCleaner, a freeware that can do wonders on your personal computer. CCleaner removes unused and temporary files on your personal computer that will allow Windows to run faster. This will not only make your personal computer faster but will also free up your disk space tremendously. As I’ve said this is a freeware and you could download them on www.ccleaner.com.

Image source: www.vir4al.ru

The very nice thing about far-out video cards is the ability to run multiple monitors off of one computer, which isn’t a new thing, but think of yourself and the pleasures that it would give you, playing your favorite game, watching DVDs (hehe!).

Windows Vista, XP, 2000, ME, and 98, is natively supported so you can display your cool desktop on 2 or more monitors.But let me focus on two monitors. To enable dual display, navigate to the “Settings” tab of the “Display Properties” screen in Windows, and where most people are used to see the controls for one monitor, you will now see two. Those two monitors settings can be enabled/disabled, set to your preference to match the configuration that they physically occupy on your desk. select “Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor”, to allow the cursor freely move from the primary display to the second if it was all one surface. You can move programs, icons, taskbars, and wallpapers onto the secondary monitor and start taking advantage of the increased desktop space. With this setup, you computer becomes more convenient and fun to use.

Personally, I love the extra space it gives me, I can spread my documents easy viewing without having to switch and tab back and forth. and being able to use one monitor for the browser, and the second one is to display my e-mails, instant messaging, Audio/video playback, and another important benefit of dual displays can be experienced in 3D games. As many of the games are now supporting multiple monitors in order to enhance the experience. In a business side of things, dual displays can also be beneficial In being able to view multiple documents at once,

The functionality of dual display is built into just about every operating system available. On the hardware side, is a funny thing. You need to have a pair of monitors (hahaha!). The second thing you have to connect the monitors to the computer, by using a dual-head graphics adaptor, such as the nVidia GeForce 6600 PCIe card. The connectors on this card allow for either one digital and one analog, or for two analog monitors to be connected to the system through the use of just one PCI Express x16 slot. There are also dual-head cards available for AGP and PCI.

For digital displays, one 15-pin VGA connection for an analog display, you can use them as a combo display of monitors by using a DVI to VGA adaptor. some cards offer two DVI connections or two VGA connections. A VGA connection is the 15-pin plugs that has been the default feature connection on computers.

For Notebooks, most modern notebooks feature a VGA connection that can either be used as the primary display or as part of a dual display arrangement with the notebook’s integrated display. But not all notebooks allow for this, as some will only mirror the display onto the attached monitor, so it is best to check the features and specifications before making any purchases.

via [PCExtreme]

AMI BIOS Beep Codes

• 1 Beep – Memory Refresh Failure (check RAM)
• 2 Beeps – Memory Parity Error in first 64KB block (check RAM)
• 3 Beeps – Memory Read/Write Error in first 64KB block (check RAM)
• 4 Beeps – Motherboard timer not functioning (may need to replace the motherboard)
• 5 Beeps – Processor Error (may need to replace the processor)
• 6 Beeps – Gate A20/keyboard controller failure (may need to replace the motherboard)
• 7 Beeps – Processor Exception Interrupt Error (may need to replace the processor)
• 8 Beeps – Display Memory Read/Write Failure (check video card)
• 9 Beeps – ROM checksum Error (replace BIOS chip or motherboard)
• 10 Beeps – CMOS shutdown Read/Write error (possible motherboard replacement)
• 11 Beeps – Bad Cache Memory – test failed (replace cache memory)

Phoenix BIOS beep codes
They are series of beeps separated by a pause,
A 1-2-1-2 series would be like :
beep *pause beep beep *pause beep *pause beep beep

• 1-1-4-1 – Cache Error (level 2)
• 1-2-2-3 – BIOS ROM Checksum
• 1-3-1-1 – DRAM Refresh Test
• 1-3-1-3 – Keyboard controller test
• 1-3-4-1 – RAM Failure on address line xxxx (check memory)
• 1-3-4-3 – RAM Failure on data bits xxxx of low byte of memory bus
• 1-4-1-1 – RAM Failure on data bits xxxx of high byte of memory bus
• 2-1-2-3 – ROM copyright notice
• 2-2-3-1 – Test for unexpected interrupts

Award BIOS beep codes:

• one long beep and two short beeps – Video error (check video card)
• two short beeps – Non-Fatal Error (check RAM)

Observe the problem
Is it a Hardware problem or a software problem? What we’re you doing while the problem occured? Did this happen in sometime recently? Did you added or installed something in the computer? Did you install a new software ? Did you add a new Hardware device? When you restarted your computer, Did the problem go away?
Define the problem
Try to find out what is the cause of the problem by checking out possible problems by the process of elimination narrowing it down until you eventually find it. Does the problem occur in one program, but not others? If the computer is networked, is the problem system-wide, or specific to that machine? Does it happen every time, or only under certain circumstances? Do you get error messages that give you clues or tell you outright what the difficulty is?

Solve the problem
First , try by restarting the computer, then check the power cable connections. Listen to the beep the computer makes during boot up. Try to look for error messages
Before you tackle a more serious approach to troubleshooting check your computer’s warranty date. If it’s still under warranty contact the manufacturer for repairs, solutions and if need be replacement.