Volume 1 - Issue 6
Welcome To All,To those of you who are visiting for the first time I greet you with hopes that you will pick up a little bit more knowledge to help you on the way to computer geekdom. To start in no way do I profess to being an expert. I've discovered that even with 10 years of working on and with computers, I still learn something new every day. My biggest problem now is being able to translate geekspeak into something that beginners can understand.
I still am a bit rough around the edges as far as attitude is concerned, but you become what you need to survive in the world of today. Enough of waxing poetic, On With The Show !!!!!! For those who have been with me from the beginning don't be shy. E-mail me and let me know if the way that I am sharing information has been helpful and any suggestions you may have for me to improve will be taken in good spirits. Everyone is welcome to share !!
Let's learn how to do some more important stuff and deal with a problem that I recently went through with my wife's business computer. She has ordered a new one built to my specifications to work more efficiently with her web page design software but more on that later. I got out of bed the other morning and upon coming down to my wife's office to say Good Morning , found her furiously burning data to CD's saying that her computer was doing funky things. I asked and she told me that after working for a while the computer locked up and she had to do a warm boot ( Press the control ,alt and delete key at the same time), and getting no response did a cold boot ( pressing the reset button or turning the computer off, wait for 30 seconds and turning it back on ). Upon booting the computer it went to the Dos screen ( black screen with white text ) giving her the choice of starting in safe mode or normal boot ( She chose to start normal ) and the computer started Ok, but because it had never done this before she began dilligently backing up her data to CD's just in case it was something major going wrong with the computer.So this is where I begin to explain that Windows 95 ,98SE and ME are not perfect operating systems. "Oh Forgive me Bill Gates " .
These operating systems over the years have improved but still are capable of making your computer do some very strange things.To name a few I've had my computer boot with no video ( A reboot solves this ), my cursor sometimes develops a mind of it's own and drops to the bottom of the screen. My wife's computer, after the episode she had with it has run just fine. I did some cleaning on it and will go into more detail on how this was done. I've only just touched the surface of things that go wrong, The Blue Screen Of Death being the most popular. I tell people that you can turn your computer on a thousand times and get a good boot every time. Then on the thousand and first it goes GAK !!!! and refuses to start and when rebooted it appears fine. Stranger than truth you say !!!! All that needs to happen when booting is for it to miss a piece of data or a file ( YES BILL GATES IT HAPPENS ) and your box gives you the rasberry.
Most Importantly back up your data. That is to say not the actual program but what you put into it. For example that speech you just spent 4 hours typing (believe me the way I type it takes longer). All word processing software has the ability to back up your data to either a file of your choice, one that it may suggest or if too large for say a floppy disk ( 1.44 mb ), burn to a cd using a program that came with your cd burner or one downloaded off the net that will work with your burner. Something that you have spent a lot of time on could be lost in the blink of an eye ( power failures can do this or even a wrong keystroke ).
Doing some clean up of your files goes a long way in keeping your computer running smoothly. I suggest defragging your hard drive at least once a month. If you have a small drive on an older computer and are constantly deleting data to make room this is very important. To explain ,when you delete data and load new data it doesn't go into the same area that was just emptied. It will go to the next open area leaving a hole and after a while your drive can resemble a piece of swiss cheese. This can slow your computer down a lot when programs trying to find a file or folder hits these blank spots on the hard drive and trips over them.
Myself being a believer that free is best rather than spending many dollars on software to clean and maintain your computer, Did you know that the tools to do this are built into each operating system on your computer. You can find them by double clicking the My Computer icon on your desktop, it will open a window that shows you your hardware such as floppy drive, cd drives, and hard drives, find the one named C as this is the boot drive which is the one we want to clean. Put the cursor over the icon of the C drive and click the right button on the mouse and this will open a list, look for properties and left click it. it will open a window with tabs that say General, Tools and Sharing, left click the tools. This will open up a window with two tools one called error checking ( Scandisk ) and one called defragment now. XP is a little different as it asks you to restart your computer to do a Checkdisk. One important thing to remember is that both of these programs have issues within their own software.
When running the Defrag for example you should go through your system tray (the small icons in the lower right corner which show some of the things which are running in the backgroud ) and shut down some of them such as your anti- virus, firewall, and things which can be closed and still keep your computer running. In this way Defrag can run without any interruption. Scandisk may give you the same problem, so do the same thing previous to running it.
On a quick note when troubleshooting I have learned that it can be the simple things that can cause problems. I just recieved my first E-mail for help ( I guess no one knows I'm out here yet, HELLO !!!!! ) , it was from a young man named Kevin who was having a problem with a partioned hard drive which was overall Ok and was split in two ( C and D ) but wouldn't store data in the D. He noticed a file in the D drive called nddundo which started me on a quest for info on Google ( Search Engine ) and I found that it stood for Norton Disk Doctor Undo. This led me to think that the problem may be in that software. Lo and behold Kevin e-mailed me back saying that I hit the problem on the head the first try. He was defragging his hard drive a while ago and it locked up and Norton closed off the D drive. He uninstalled Norton and then re-loaded it and it solved the problem. Kevin is on his way to geekdom for spotting the file in the drive and now has learned that sometimes just looking at changes you may have made recently can give you trouble. Congrats Kevin you've learned a new thing, keep on learning, read lots and follow my articles. If you would like to learn more? Check out this totally free education site.
www.howstuffworks.com
