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When your system crashes,
there is no lonelier feeling in the universe. The cause might be as simple as a bad power supply or it could be as bad as a trashed hard drive. While you can always buy a new power supply or hard drive or reinstall Windows, there's often no way to recover important financial records or work assignments, and there's no compensation—monetary or otherwise—for the loss of personal correspondence or creative projects. There is no substitute for having your work files backed up and in a safe place.
If disaster does strike, these tips will help you identify the problem and get on the road to recovery.
Listen to your sick PC
When troubleshooting your PC, be sure to use your various senses; go beyond just looking at what's on the screen. Your ears can be very helpful in providing information to help you identify the causes of certain types of problems. For example, listening to the types of sounds your disk drives make when booting up the PC can tell you a lot about how far the boot process is proceeding, and also about the status of the drives themselves.
Record any error messages
Keeping track of error messages makes it much easier to troubleshoot problems, and having screen shots of error message dialog boxes makes the process even more efficient. Fortunately, Windows provides you with everything you need. When an error message appears onscreen, press [Alt][Print Screen]. Then, click the Start button and launch a word processor such as WordPad. Once it launches, pull down the Edit menu and select the Paste command. You may also wish to type what steps you took to produce the error before saving it to file.
Email your questions to us
Armed with the information that you have, you are ready to tell someone specifics about your computer problem. We can discuss the solutions to your problem by return email. There is usually a simple answer for why your PC is acting that way.