Troubleshooting a PC is generally not that hard as long as you take things slowly and focus on different parts of the PC. The worst thing you can do when you troubleshoot your PC is to use the random approach, and start making changes to your PC. In the end, you could have a PC with more issues than you started.

Take a second and identify what it is that is not working on your PC. To say it is working slow, or not "acting" right is not going to help you. Think of it in a detail sense, like maybe for example when you open a certain window the PC freezes up. Once you have written down the problem, look at the rest of your PC and see if the problem you wrote down in detail is the only problem or are there other problems also. If the issue is only within an application, it may not be your whole PC, but the application that you are using specifically.

After you have written down all your issues that your PC is having, sit back and think about what changes you have made to your PC. Have you installed new hardware like a video card or network card? Maybe you installed a new piece of software. After all, there is a lot of "demo" software available on the web. And it is tempting to just install software with no consideration that the software may not work on your PC.

At this time consider any possible warranties or extended warranties that you may have on your PC. Many people forget two years later that they bought a 3 year warranty. For PC’s like Dell, HP and Apple, you can go to the vender’s site and type in your serial number to see if your PC or laptop is still under warranty. You can also call the vender. Explain your problem and see if your PC is still in warranty.

If you have recently made hardware changes to your PC, remove the the hardware and the drivers that you recently installed. You can do this by removing the software/drivers in Control panel; on XP Add/remove programs , or on Vista Programs and Features (select the application that you want to remove and right click to select uninstall) OR you can use system restore (see next paragraph) . After you removed the hardware and software drivers, see if your issue went away. If it has, then go to the manufacturer’s website, search to see if there is a new driver or software fix to resolve the issue. However, if the issue has not gone away, do not reinstall the the hardware that you removed, continue troubleshooting. Later, when you fix your PC you can go back and reinstall the hardware.

The other option to remove drivers is to use system restore (this can fix drivers / software issues by reverting back to a state in time of the OS ).

To do a system restore, you click on Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, click system restore. Select the option that says " restore my computer to an earlier time ", and click Next. You will now see a calendar showing all of the system restore points of your important system files. Select the restore point just before you first noticed that your PC was having an issue. If you are not exactly sure, you can always restore back to your current configuration. Follow the prompts.. You will most likely have to reboot your PC or laptop when you restore back you system files. If the problem has gone away, great! otherwise continue reading on. If you did a system restore after you removed the hardware, try going to the vender’s website to download the newest drivers and reinstall the hardware.

If you have not installed any hardware recently, or at least you have removed what you have recently installed onto your PC. Try to think back to see if you made any changes to the configuration of your PC. Did you go into the options of the application? Maybe you made a small change to the settings of the hardware. Again, if you did, try to remember what it is that you did and revert those changes back to the way they were. You may have to use last known configuration and system restore to revert back those changes if you forgot what it is that you did (see prior paragraph to do system restore). Reboot your PC and if the PC is using windows press F8 during the boot process. When you see a menu, select restore to last know hardware configuration. Hopefully this will revert the changes to the way they were before you changed them.

Now we are at the point of troubleshooting the existing PC hardware (meaning you ruled out any recently added / installed hardware and now trying to see if there is any bad / broken PC hardware ). This can be the tough part of the troubleshooting. However, there are things that you can do that does not require expert PC knowledge. If you are receiving disk not found errors either during the boot process or while you are within the operating system then more likely than not the hard drive is or has gone bad.

To check within the operating system you need to look at the system event log: on XP right click on my computer and select manage . On the left hand side go down to event logs and select system. Scroll down and see if you see any disk errors. On Vista, the only difference is after you click on manage, you need to go to Event Viewer, Windows logs and then select System.

If you do not see any video on your flat panel or CRT monitor, try plugging the monitor into another pc . Does the monitor work now? Then maybe the monitor is fine but the video card is bad. Now, I am assuming you did not make any software conjuration changes. Or maybe at this point you just remembered that you did make a setting change for the video card, again now is a good time to revert those changes as mentioned earlier.

At this point you may want to seek the advice of an expert. But before you do, look back in your records to see how much you paid for your desktop PC or laptop. Today PCs are so cheap that it may not be cost effective to pay someone a lot of money when you bought your PC five years ago, or maybe you paid for the PC less then it would cost to repair the PC by an expert. See if you can get a free estimate of what is wrong with your PC and how much it would cost to repair the PC.

Finally, you can allows submit a question on this forum to see if we can give you an direction on how to resolve your PC or laptop problem.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 7:37 am and is filed under PC Trouble Shooting.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.