THE BASIC GUIDE TO TROUBLESHOOTING COMMON WINDOWS PC PROBLEMS Your Windows PC might be designed to make your life easier, but they often have a non-stop list of problems. Today well walk through some of the more common problems and how to troubleshoot them. This list is, of course, by no means complete, and you should always use best practices to make sure that your PC doesnt need to be reinstalled all the time, is properly secured with anti-virus and a firewall, and is properly backed up at all times—but if youre currently having problems, keep reading for a list of common problems and troubleshooting techniques. Try Safe Mode First When your PC just wont boot into Windows at all, youll probably want to start off with Safe Mode—use the F8 key right when the system starts up to access the menu and see if Windows will boot into Safe Mode. If youre able to get into Windows, the problem is likely something that would load only when you boot normally—graphics card drivers, junk applications, or perhaps some spyware applications. Even Safe Mode Doesnt Work If you cant even get into Safe Mode, you should use the Startup Repair tools, which can be accessed from the Advanced options in the Safe Mode menu; you can pull out your system repair disc, or your Windows installation disc and use the Repair option. If youre having a bootloader problem that says bootmgr is missing, you can use the command prompt from an installation CD and use the bootrec /fixboot command. The Basic Guide to Troubleshooting Common Windows PC Problems Use System Restore System Restore in Windows XP might not have been the greatest tool, but since Windows Vista came around, its been an excellent choice for fixing up all sorts of problems, including issues that cause your system to not boot anymore. While testing, I once deleted a bunch of files in system32 to purposely cause a blue screen of death, and then used System Restore to get the system up and running again in minutes. If youre unfamiliar with the process, you can follow this step-by-step guide to restoring your PC with System Restore. Try Booting Off an Ubuntu CD Whenever Im having issues with a PC not booting up properly, one of the first things I do is grab an Ubuntu Live CD and try and boot from that, and see how well the system is working. If everything is working in Linux, then you know the problem is likely just your Windows installation, and not hardware related. PC Crashing or Blue Screening The Basic Guide to Troubleshooting Common Windows PC Problems When your PC is crashing with the blue screen of death at random intervals, you should make sure that you first disable the automatic reboot after the blue screen, and then write down the error message so you can Google it later. If youre able to get back into Windows, you can try using the previously mentioned BlueScreenView tool to give you some extra information about the error message, but your best bet is usually to do a search. If youre using Windows 7 or later and youre getting a blue screen of death, chances are very high that the problem is either driver or hardware related—contrary to legend, Windows just doesnt crash like that very much unless the problem is tied to hardware somehow. Once youve identified the driver causing the problem, try and head into Safe Mode and uninstall or upgrade the driver causing the problem—sometimes the driver wont be visible, so youll need to use a command-line trick to show hidden devices in Device Manager. If youre doing a bunch of work in Safe Mode, sometimes its helpful to force Windows to load into Safe Mode without using the F8 key every time.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Nov 2013 17:43:51 +0000
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