Trouble shooting with a PC; Things to look for

Vishnu K. Mahmud, Contributor, Jakarta

You've just purchased a new program or piece of hardware to run on your PC but after you installed it the entire system slows down or hangs occasionally. Or, your computer now tends to crash sporadically yet you've done nothing that would have destabilized the operating system. What's going on?

Computers are actually dumb machines. They follow their orders via the various programs installed in the PC from power up to shutdown. But sometimes things get a little "confused". Sometimes the programs are too new, too old or just conflicts with the hardware it sees.

The following tips will hopefully point you to the right direction since there are so many things that need to be checked when trouble-shooting a computer. With a bit of luck, you can avoid taking your PC to the shop for costly and lengthy "repairs".

Before you do anything, always make sure you have a back up of all your data. This is not difficult to do and should always be done even if the computer is happily chugging along problem free. Owning a computer brings responsibilities and data maintenance is extremely important.

If you only have one hard drive (the C drive), it would be advisable to "partition" or divide your hard drive virtually so you can have 2 hard drives (C and D drive); one for the operating system and programs while the other is for your data files.

In this case, you can safely format the C drive and store all you data on D. Partition Magic is excellent software for partitioning hard drives without any data loss.

If you've just installed a new piece of hardware but it works sporadically, make sure that you've fit it with the latest driver for your operating system. Using a Windows 2000 driver on Windows XP may not always succeed although they are sometimes compatible. Your hardware manufacturer may have the latest driver on its website.

If the hardware is rather old, check the chipset provider as well (the company who provided the chips for the hardware manufacture). You can see the chipset name stamped on the microchip. Do a search on the net for their website and download the appropriate driver for your operating system.

When my computer would not turn off by itself although the operating system had commanded it to (and my hardware allegedly supported ATX shut down protocols), I upgraded the BIOS of my motherboard (as it was rather old) so it could accept the latest operating system codes.

BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System, the built in software within each computer's hardware. This low-level system provides the basic instruction set for the computer to communicate with its peripherals. Sometimes, however, it needs to be upgraded by flashing the BIOS.

Flashing involves updating the BIOS with the help of software provided by the hardware manufacture. New programs or operating systems would sometimes prompt the manufacturer to release new BIOS to address any incompatibilities.

Although it is relatively easy to do so, it is important to ensure that a flash in progress is not interrupted otherwise it may render the hardware useless.

Within the Windows' operating system, there is a database called the registry used to store configuration files of the many programs that reside in a computer. Whenever you install or remove a program, the registry is always updated.

Sometimes, however, when a user removes a program, the program's configuration files are still referenced in the registry and can sometimes conflict with others.

You should use Registry Cleaner (RegClean) by Microsoft to clean out your registry. This freeware is available via download.com.

Operating systems require some hard disk space to store and utilize their swap or paging files. These files are temporarily stored in the hard drive before being moved to the computer's main memory for processing.

For Windows users, it would be ideal to have at least 500 megabytes in the C drive for the operating system to use. If you don't have that, move or delete some files from the C drive. The less free space you have, the more time it may take for the computer to execute a program.

Files saved on the hard drive should be stored in a contiguous fashion so the operating system can access them quickly. If a file is divided into four parts in different areas of the hard disk, it may take a while for the computer to load a program.

To make the hard drive more efficient, it should be defragmented to optimize file storage. Windows comes with a built in disk defragmenter program which users can utilize to make their hard drive work more efficiently.

If you've done all of the above and your system is still giving you a hard time, a total reinstallation of the operating system may be in order. Sometimes there is so much garbage in the operating system you have to totally clean out the junk from old installs, including removing programs and corrupt files.

To do this, format the hard drive and do a clean re-install of the operating system and your programs from your CD's. Make sure you have backups of all your data files (Word documents, spreadsheet dossiers, save game files) as well as hardware device drivers either on a CD-Rom or in another partition (section) of your hard drive.

This is not a painful process, just something that "normal" users are afraid to do. Power users, PC gamers and ultra geeks reinstall their operating systems once every 3 months. It's not that difficult, however it may be time consuming.

But in the end, a clean install may zero in on what your computer problem is if it occurs after you install a particular program.

For more help about your computer problems, go to various power user sites such as Cnet (cnet.com), Tweak3D (tweak3D.net) or Little White Dog (littlewhitedog.com) to name a few. The community there can help you trouble shoot any problems you may be having and in the end, you can learn something about computers, operating systems and hardware.