Basic PC Troubleshooting

• Fan dampeners

  30Mar
  Categories: PC Maintenance Tips Comments: 0

  
  Because overheating can become a major factor in a PC’s malfunction, proper circulation has become the goal of all PC users who are more hands-on in how they care for their PCs. These are the type of users who will actually buy fans for circulation and install it on their own. But usually the resulting problem of putting fans in the CPU is the additional noise that fans provide. There’s very little you can do with the whir of the fans but you can do something about the rattling that some fans produce. Using dampeners is the best way of removing any kind of rattling. These dampeners are made of rubber and are meant to replace metal screws when attaching fans. The dampeners work by absorbing the vibration made by fans.

  Tags: fan dampener, fan damper, Pc Maintenance

• Stripping down your Computer

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

  

  The first thing you should do is remove the system from the case, place it on a non-conductive surface, and disconnect all components from the motherboard with these exceptions

  • CPU (and heatsink/fan)
  • A single stick of memory
  • Video
  • Power supply
  • Power button

  This means no drives, no peripherals, no extra ports, nothing. This tests two problems at once. They are the possibility of some peripheral preventing the system from powering up and the possibility of the motherboard shorting onto the case somehow (aka, a standoff that should not be there).

  To do a quick elimination (only if the system is completely failing to give any power at all), find where the power button connects and short those two pins for a moment with anything conductive that you have on hand. A screwdriver, knife, coin, or anything metal will work. If the system spins up, you need a new power button. (If your system was already spinning up, you can skip this step.)

  If the system fails to power up outside the case, here are two things you need to do. First, do a visual inspection of all the capacitors on the motherboard. These are the little battery-looking things. What you’ll be looking for is any fluid leaking out of the top or bottom, any “gook” anywhere on them, or if they are bulging out the top or sides.

  While you’re poking around for bad capacitors, take a look at the ATX power connector; make sure it doesn’t have any scorch marks or look melted. If anything shows any of these characteristics, your motherboard is almost definitely your problem. If they all look ok, test repeatedly, with each stick of memory individually in each slot (this means nine tests for three sticks of memory on a board with three slots!).

  If the system eventually powers up, you’ve found good memory — probably your only problem — and you’re probably done. Put the stripped-down version back into the case and secure it. If it powers up again, skip to step 9.

  If not, you need to remove it again and investigate the setup of your motherboard standoffs and make sure nothing is touching the motherboard where it should not be touched. After this is done and all is well with the basics inside the case, skip to step 9.

  If it fails to power up with any memory configuration out of the case, we know it must be either the CPU, the memory, the video, the motherboard, or the power supply, or any combination thereof.

  Source

• PC Tips : Ventilation

  10Jun
  Categories: PC Maintenance Tips Comments: 0

  

  Find an opening in your case, or an air hole on the bottom. With the PC running, by placing a match or lighter flame close to the hole or opening you can check if the air hole sucks the flame toward the case or does it push the flame away. If the flame is pushed away then this indicates that you have positive airflow within the PC’s case and that will keep dust away from accumulating inside the case. Well if the flame is not pushed away but rather sucked in well i guess it’s time for a case upgrade.

  Now with the dust accumulating inside the case even with the said “tested” positive airflow, it’s still prone to dust accumulation in time, which can lead to overheating and other problems. It’s best to periodically, take the PC outside, remove its cover, and with can of compressed air from 8 to 12 inches away to blow out the dust, and also clean out the fans too…

• Avast: Free Anti-Virus Software for your PC

  10May
  Categories: PC Info, PC Maintenance Tips, PC Tips, Windows Vista, Windows XP Comments: 0

  

  To ensure the top quality performance rendered by our personal computers, we should make sure that we have the most up to date anti-virus softwares. Our anti-virus softwares installed on our computes will be the one to protect our precious computers from threats and viruses. We all know how expensive premium anti-virus softwares can be these days. But don’t fret anymore because there are free anti-virus softwares out there just like Avast Home Edition which I am using for years on my personal computer. The free version of Avast is very much reliable as updates are released often and the software auto-updates itself. With this software, you are sure that your computer is safe from viruses that can degrade the quality of performance your computers is rendering.

  Image source: www.arifin-88.co.cc

• PC TIPS : Using Power Protection

  10Apr
  Categories: PC Maintenance Tips Comments: 0

  

  There are levels of protection that you can apply to help protect your PC, your data from loss or damage as a result of power problems. And yes you have to shell out cash in order to have better protection, the more you spend the better protection you get, with costs ranging from near zero to several hundred dollars or even more. A Decent Surge Protector, and an Uninterruptible Power Supply(UPS) starts in around $40 to $60 bucks to about $80, so better save up, it’s worth it.

  And Yes, keep in mind that a higher Joule rating generally means more protection, and also it does the filtering, enhancing or modifying the utility power, special circuitry and batteries are used to prevent the PC from losing power during a disruption (blackout) or voltage sag (brownout). These units are called different names depending on their exact design, but all fit into the general category of backup power.

• 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 »