I keep getting asked this. Most of the time getting the answer to this isn't as easy as you would like. Whether it won't boot or constantly crashes or now just takes forever to do anything, there are usually multiple reasons. Once everything is running smoothly you should check out General Precautions to either prevent problems or limit the damage.

Most of the time you get a serious problem people will tell you, “It's a virus.” and chances are this is probably the first thing that comes to most people's minds. Usually, I have found this isn't the case for most people unless you've thrown caution to the wind and not done anything under General Precautions.

If your computer crashes randomly or locks up this is most likely due to either a hardware problem or bad software running which includes viruses and poorly written programs.

If you experience ridiculous slowdowns where your PC seems to be going in slow motion. This is probably from bad software running. It is also possible that you do not have enough memory installed which is a hardware problem.

If your computer won't boot and you get messages like "No operating system" or similar this is a problem with your hard drive.

Hopefully, the notes here will help or enlighten. Caveat emptor. The information here is meant to help but there are no guarantees. Understand what you are doing before attempting to do it. Naturally, don't open up your PC unless you know there's no chance of causing damage to yourself or anything inside. If you're not sure of what you're doing or have further questions please take your problem to a professional. Peeps on my friends list are free to message me. I'm trying to keep it as simple and as brief as possible but there are volumes being left unsaid.

Yes, it is complicated. There's a world of difference between using a computer and maintaining one. Just as there's a huge difference between driving a car and maintaining one. Most people see a professional for their car. So why think a computer should be so easy when problems occur? A lot of what goes wrong is related to security. Most people will never experience a carjacking but the equivalent isn't true for their computer.

First of all, if your computer is freezing up make sure it isn't a defective keyboard or mouse. If one works but not the other try replacing it.

If you recently moved the computer by shipping it or boxing it up and driving somewhere it is most likely a card, CPU or RAM is not fully seated in it's slot or a cable is loose. Check that out first. Add-on cards are generally screwed in. If you have one missing a screw where it should be screwed down, re-seat the card and screw it in.

The most common hardware problems are.

1.RAM
2.Overheating
3.Defective Power Supply
4.Bad/flaky System Board aka Motherboard

RAM

To check for defective RAM, download the latest memory test from memtest.org. Find the download section and download either the floppy version or CD version if you can burn a CD. These will be boot discs. You create it, boot it, eject the disc, and let it run overnight. The reason for ejecting the disc is in case your system flakes and does a reboot during the night. If you left the disc in, it would simply reboot and when you came back you'd never know there had been a problem. If it did reboot then your cause is not memory but another hardware problem.

But before you run memtest, you should check to see that you have enough, assuming your system boots.

If you're checking for slowdown or instability problems due to not enough memory (RAM) check the amount of RAM vs. the amount in use. The amount of memory is the amount of RAM installed not the size of your hard drive. To check the amount of RAM installed, right-click on My Computer and select Properties. Under the General tab it will list your CPU, speed and the amount of RAM. To see how much RAM is in use check Task Manager. Right click on the Windows task bar at the bottom of the screen. Right-click in the big area that shows what windows are open and not on the Start button or the Tray are where the clock is. You need to right-click in a blank area. You'll see a selection for Task Manager. Click it and bring it up. This will show you a window with a few tabs. Select the Performance Tab. You'll see two graphs, CPU usage and PF Usage which is your Memory Usage. If either of the graphs is really close to the top you probably have a problem. First off, let me just say if you are running Windows XP and you only bought 512MB of RAM for your computer, you don't have enough. XP needs something close to 384MB just to boot. Start running a few programs and you're going to be out fast. Your system will try to juggle the memory usage by swapping it out and using space on your hard drive. This is an extremely slow thing to do. Everything will be painfully slow and your hard drive light on your PC will be on most of the time. Some programs simply crash at this point occasionally taking your system down with them. Chances are your CPU usage is pegged near the top as well because of this.

If you have plenty of memory but your CPU usage is pegged you may be able to find the culprit by selecting the Applications tab in Task Manager but probably not. A better and free alternative to Task Manager is Process Explorer. It is free from sysinternals.com. Process Explorer will give also give you a more accurate view of memory usage. Process Explorer will list every program and service running and show you what percentage of the CPU they are using. Usually, your PC is mainly idle waiting for you or something to do something that needs attention. So typically, you'll see System Idle Processes around 97%. Most things listed under this heading are not decipherable by most people. If something other than idle processes is constantly taking a huge amount of CPU time it may not be possible to identify it easily if it is listed under this section because it is likely the name of the service listed not the program using the service. However if it's a program that is running then it will be easy to identify it and decide whether it is legit or not and either uninstall it or find another method to destroy it.


Overheating

Overheating is typically caused by fans inside the PC failing. You'll need to open the case while it's running. Needless to say, if you're not a pro don't stick your hands in while the power is on. You should check that all fans are running at full speed and not noisy. A noisy fan is usually due to the bearings inside becoming worn. When that happens it can't run at full speed and whatever it's attempting to cool can overheat. There is a fan on your CPU and at least one fan inside your power supply. There is also possibly a fan or two installed to the case wall to suck in or blow out additional air. There are possibly other fans on the system board and on cards installed, particularly video cards. Check them all. If you have a lot of dust on fans or blocking air vents into the case, power of the PC and clean it out with a can of compressed air. Watch out because dust will blow everywhere if you're not careful. I have also seen fans destroyed by trying to blow the dust out. Somehow dust gets blown into where the bearings are and the fan has to be replaced. So, be careful. Don't bother with fans inside the power supply if they aren't running and don't open the power supply. Replace it instead.

Power Supply

The power supply is the gray box that all the power cables either go into or come out of. Unfortunately, power supply problems are hard to spot. As they get older they may not deliver constant power at the correct voltages causing mini brown-outs and black-outs inside your PC If you have a spare power supply that matches your current one you can replace it and see if your problems go away. Some of the big brands like HP and Compaq use a special form factor for their power supplies making them extremely hard to get replacements for except from them. If you are lucky you may be able to find a “dashboard” program that works with your system board. A dashboard program resembles a car's dashboard and can show you things like the temperature inside your PC case and CPU, voltages being generated by your power supply and speed of some of the fans spinning inside. I don't use them so there isn't one I can recommend but some are made and distributed freely by the manufacturers of the system boards.

System Board

These are some of the hardest problems to diagnose. Unless you have issues like the system crashes whenever you plug in a USB device or something clearly to pinpoint it you may never fully be sure unless you simply replace it.

Sometimes you run a piece of software like a game and it crashes your PC. Sometimes it's not the game but the game is utilizing an audio or graphics feature that isn't normally used. If the game isn't at fault it could be the audio or graphics drivers but it could also be defective hardware.

System board replacement is expensive and time consuming so don't do it without good reason.

If the PC doesn't boot or recognize an operating system check the boot up screen to make sure it's listed and listed correctly. If you don't get a plain text boot up screen but get your manufacturers logo instead, you'll need to get into system's BIOS setup and change it to show the text screen with RAM and drive information. You need to see your drive appear and the correct size displayed before continuing. Before blaming the drive, first try and borrow a drive and see if the system recognizes that one. If not it's likely the motherboard is defective.

It's pretty tough to continue from this point because it really requires a second PC. Installing your hard drive as a 2nd drive in another computer can tell you how bad the situation is. IMPORTANT: When installing it on another PC you may get a message while Windows is booting telling you that one of your drives must be checked for consistency or similar message. It will only give you a few seconds to cancel out by hitting a key. HIT THAT KEY. You don't want Windows trying to correct anything because it may get it wrong and lose data you might have been able to recover.

First check if Windows displays the drive correctly. You can check the drive under My Computer if it appears and its size correct. If not you need to get to the Disk Management option in Manage My Computer. If you don't know how to find this, hit the Start Menu and select Help and find how to get to get to Disk Management.

If your drive shows up correctly and you can get files off of it, great! It's likely the boot loader for Windows just got corrupted somehow. Your data is fine. I've never needed one but there are programs you can download, probably for free that can repair the Windows/NT boot loader.

If the drive did not displaying the correct size under the disk manager this is a harder situation. The partition table is corrupted. If your lucky, you have recovery software and made a backup of the partition when you got it. If not, there's still hope.

I'm going to assume one thing, and that's how your drive was partitioned. And I could be wrong. Generally, unless you're very clever Windows 2000 and Windows XP make you use the NTFS file system on any drive larger than 32GB and it's the default option for anything smaller anyway. The other file system is the FAT file system which Windows 95/98 used. The NTFS system is the harder one to recover from anyway and that's what I'll be talking about. But feel free to read on because you may still find information you can use.

I don't recommend this but IF you really, really, need and want to try going the free cheap route you can try NTFS Reader from ntfs.com but there's a good chance it won't get past the invalid partition. I haven't found a free tool that could do it and even some pay ones that sound like they should, don't. The only way I have gotten around the invalid partition for free was to find an identical drive that was partitioned the same way and copy the first 70 sectors from that hard drive. (I'm not going to give instruction on how to do this because it's way to easy to really screw up either or both drives. You'll need to get that info elsewhere.) Then maybe NTFS reader will be able to find your data and let you copy it to another hard drive. It's limitation is that it can only write to FAT drives. I don't recommend this route but if you're broke and desperate and really have no other choice, then I suppose it's an option. NTFS reader like the other software I've tried from them is not very robust and prone to lock up and cannot get past a physical error on the drive.

It is possible a recovery tool designed to fix lost partitions or un-format drives will work. Or not. There are several out there. If they work, it's the easy route. Your data may be there, if not then read on,

The option I do recommend is to go to runtime.org and use one their recovery tools. It's called GetDataBack and they make a version for NTFS and FAT. Each is about $80. The only good news here is that you can download it and run it for free and it will do everything except copy your data off. You don't need to use a partition recovery tool first. This will work anyway. If you see that this will work for you then you pay them and they give you the license key. The program will not repair the drive, it will let you copy it off. This is actually a good thing since it can never destroy your original. One important thing, if it encounters physical errors on the disk it will give you the option to ignore them. I recommend ignoring them individually at first rather than choosing to ignore all of them at once. There shouldn't be any but if there are only a few particularly near the end it's not a big deal. Once it has scanned your drive it will show you a drive map or a selection of drive maps to recover. Pick the one that seems likely if you are given a choice. It's non-destructive so you can always go back and pick the other one. One thing I do recommend because of how NTFS works is for important files like documents, do a search for them. It is possible you may find several intact revisions of them and the one in My Documents may not really be the current one. It's difficult to explain simply why this is but consider yourself lucky it is that way.

If it did encounter errors while scanning your disk, as in hundreds of errors, there is one thing you should do before attempting to recover your data. You need one other tool. Spinrite from spinrite.com. This is the only program I know capable of recovering from physical errors on a hard drive. It is capable of reading the through physical errors, correcting them and writing it back out to the disk without errors. What creates a physical error? Powering off the hard drive while it's in the middle of writing or a chunk of the magnetic media on the spinning drive platter went flying off.

Once you've recovered your data, you can format the hard drive and re-install Windows. If the drive had physical errors on it, I would get a new drive.

ACCESSING YOUR PC's BIOS:

Typically, this is done by hitting the Delete key right when your system powers up. If your PC's maker hasn't covered the boot up screen with their pretty logo, you will typically see it counting up the amount of RAM you have and there's a message that says what key to hit to enter your system's Setup. Like I said, typically it's the delete key but some makers use F1 or F2 or you may need to hit Alt-F1 or something similar. If you get the pretty logo instead of the text screen telling you what key to hit you can try these, otherwise you'll need to find your system's manual. If you got the pretty logo screen, turn it off (at least for now). There's a setting for your boot up screen that is set to something like "Logo". Turn it off. Usually the "+" or "-" keys or the page-up page-down keys do the trick. Sometimes they're sneaky and there's a setting that says whether the boot up screen will even tell you what key to press. If that's the case with yours and it's set to off, change it.

Since your reading this, your probably a novice at this and probably shouldn't change anything here. First, watch the system boot up. You should check that the amount of RAM the system displayed matches what you have and when it gets around to displaying what drives you have that you see your hard drives and any CD/DVD drives built into your system. Typically, your hard drive will appear on the boot up screen right next to your CD/DVD drives. Occasionally, they won't. And you'll see a gap of several lines or the screen will clear and another drive controller will display them attached to it and it may tell you to hit Ctrl-H or Ctrl-A to enter it's setup screen

Your hard drive should have appeared and something approximating the correct size. If you had a 200GB Western Digital drive you might see an entry like "WDC2000 196GB", which is fine. If it isn't there or the size isn't within a few percent of its size you'll need to see if the system's BIOS can locate it. Hopefully, you only had one controller message display which means it's handled in your system's BIOS. If not and you got a separate prompt from a different drive controller try that one first.
If your not in the main BIOS' screen but a separate controller's screen then there should be an option to detect drives. If it shows up, great. If not, reboot and check enter the main BIOS' setup.

The main screen is usually a main menu containing a list of other menu screens like Standard CMOS Features, Advanced BIOS Features, etc. select Standard CMOS Features or the first one listed if there isn't a similar option. The screen should show you what drives you have installed. If it's missing, try and locate it by selecting each of the empty entries, hitting enter and have it attempt to Auto-Detect it. If it was listed but was the wrong size then select it and see if Auto-Detect will correct the size. The size displayed needs to be within a few percent of what you know it to be. If your hard drive didn't appear go back to the main menu. If there's a menu for another drive controller select it and try to locate it again. Your hard drive needs to show up somewhere if it's functional. If the drive does not display it is either dead or it is not getting power or the cable was disconnected. Unless you just got the PC by mail delivered by a gorilla, it's unlikely the cable is loose. You'll need to have someone check it out to make sure the drive is really dead and everything on it is lost.

It's been estimated that at least 70% of all Windows PCs in the world have been compromised. Note that the word is compromised and not vulnerable. Meaning at some point evil software got onto their system and has been running silently in the background doing its thing.

Viruses, malware (malicious software) and trojans are similar. Viruses do harm and attempt to spread, malware simply does harm and trojans are used by hackers/crackers to install a program that can do evil things on your computer like lurk for credit card transactions or use your PC to email spam around the world. Ever notice if you leave your PC running how most spam gets to you after 5 or 6 PM when people get home from work and start turning on their home PCs?

Programs of this type can get onto your system from email attachments, infected documents and spreadsheets, visiting malicious web pages without staying current on Windows Updates, or from connecting your PC directly up to your modem (including DSL and Cable modems) and connecting to the Internet without running a firewall program. There was even a method if getting a virus on your PC just from viewing a .jpg picture. The vulnerability could still be there unless you've stayed current on Windows Update and updates on any art/picture software that was vulnerable.

The only sure way to know if you've been hit by a virus, trojan or malware is if you recognize it's symptoms, it pops up a message and tells you or you run an anti-virus program that detects it.

Often you may hear about new virus in the news. Usually, the major anti-virus makers will release a free standalone program that will remove it and often be able to undo damage it has done.

Spyware is getting pretty common. Spyware sits in the background quietly collecting data on you. What websites you visit, what you buy, what you like. It periodically “phone's home” to report this information to some evil corporation. Your information is sold and used to target you for sales from whoever thinks they know what you'll want or other nefarious purposes. It usually gets on your computer pretending to be something nice and typically free. Offers for free software that organize your pictures, put cute smiley icons in your emails, and believe it or not even give you software to protect you from spyware! Basically, any ad you see on a web page that offers you free software that does anything is suspect. Usually, they use wording that appears to say they are doing for something innocuous back from you or they simply outright lie about what they will install.

Since the purpose of spyware is to monitor everything you do, it has to infect a lot and process what web pages you're viewing, what their content is and what you select, even what you type into search engines. The typical effect is that you notice your system seems to run slower. What's worse is that you can get multiple spyware programs fighting and trying to see what you're doing. Not only does your system get slower it often becomes unstable.