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Basic PC Troubleshooting

• Your Keyboard is Worse than Your Toilet

  12Dec
  Categories: Hardware, PC Info, PC Maintenance Tips, PC Tips Comments: 0

  

  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

• Clean the inside of your CPU

  15Nov
  Categories: PC Maintenance Tips, PC Tips, PC Troubleshooting Tips Comments: 0

  

  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

• Speeding Up : WinXP’s Shutdown

  17Oct
  Categories: PC Info, PC Maintenance Tips, PC Tips, Software, Windows XP Comments: 0

  

  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

• Clean your PC thoroughly

  29Sep
  Categories: PC Maintenance Tips, PC Tips, PC Troubleshooting Tips, Software Comments: 0

  

  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

• Stubborn OS – Downgrade it!

  23May
  Categories: PC Info, PC Maintenance Tips, PC Tips, PC Troubleshooting Tips, Software, Windows Vista, Windows XP Comments: 0

  It has happened with Vista and is seemingly also being built into Windows 7, the ability to downgrade should the user deem it too stubborn or complicated to use. The beta-testing of Win 7 is already underway and it seemingly looks nice yet Microsoft is again taking no chances by building into the OS a downgrade feature should it suffer a catastrophic failure. Operating system’s are normally better as time goes by and as with Vista, time was not on it’s side that people simply refused to bite into their many advantages (if that’s what they called them). Read more »

• Slow PC – Too many Files ?!?!?

  22Mar
  Categories: Hardware, Information, PC Maintenance Tips, PC Tips, PC Troubleshooting Tips, Windows XP Comments: 0

  Hard drivesare quite reliable, so reliable today that they have gotten cheaper and better, lasting longer than their predecessors. Along with the many innovations, they have also grown in terms of data density or the amount of data that can be stored within the same footprint. Having a Pentium 4 that you bought a couple of years back might still be working right but as you may have noticed, it may have gotten a tad bit too slow. Read more »

• Updating and running your anti-virus

  11Feb
  Categories: PC Maintenance Tips, Software, Windows Vista, Windows XP Comments: 0

  Many people underestimate the importance of updating their anti-virus definitions and usually end up getting infected by some random trojan or worm when it could ave been perfectly preventable by a simple update of definitions.

  Anti-virus programs are very simple to update – some even do the updating for you. But if that’s not the case, you can always update at least twice a week manually, of you feel that updating everyday is too much of a hassle. You should also do a full scan of your computer at least twice a month to make sure that everything’s free from any lurking viruses. Also remember to do a full scan of any portable hard disks or flash drives that you’re plugging into your desktop computer or laptop.

• XP to get Extended Life?

  09Jan
  Categories: PC Maintenance Tips, Software, Windows Vista, Windows XP Comments: 0

  XP support services is set to go offline this mid-year to the disdain of many PC users all over the globe. With moves and petitions to bolster a move to get that deadline extended, they have fallen on deaf ears. While the market may become deprived of the said support systems, XP is still going to ship with new HP laptops till 2010 according to industry insiders who have negotiated with Microsoft for the said service extension. this comes as a blow to the software giant who has been hoping for similar progress with their Vista Operating system but with no bites. Read more »

• Windows XP users bane: Slow boot up

  10Dec
  Categories: PC Maintenance Tips, PC Troubleshooting Tips Comments: 0

  

  Wanting to have a faster Windows XP boot up is something most PC users want, but seems they can’t have. With the advent of trojans and its dastardly ilk, it’s making the OS boot up even slower. What can you do?

  According to the experts the best way to go about this is to find the source:

  Legitimate programs usually put an icon in the SysTray, next to the clock on the Windows Taskbar. Right-clicking an icon will often let you tell the program not to load. However, Microsoft provides msconfig, a good utility for controlling how Windows starts up. To run it, click Start, select Run, type msconfig in the box and click OK. The Startup tab on the far right lists the programs being loaded, but it’s worth looking through the other tabs. Microsoft has a trouble-shooting guide to using it: search Google for Q310560.

  More info here.

• Seminar regarding PC Troubleshooting

  07Aug
  Categories: PC Maintenance Tips, PC Troubleshooting Tips Comments: 0

  
  image source: http://sfbay.craigslist.org

  I remember before when I attended a seminar entitled basic pc troubleshooting by a technician of a known computer repair company at our school. He just teaches us the basic of pc or its parts with a hands-on. The speaker ask us to disassemble the CPU in front of us by taking out the ram or memory, the AGP-VGA card also known as video card, the IDE HARD disk and it’s power cable, and of course the CPU or the processor. He also gives us the codes of blue screen error, the beep codes error and the frequent errors they encounter as technician. He also gives tips on how to maintain out computer so that the computer will last long especially as an IT student who have a lot of computer works for school. He also give us the tips in buying for a new pc the best quality peripherals and hardware.