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Recovering from a Crash
(Article Contributed By Dino - Posted on May 01st, 2008)
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Every business and trade has its tools. A carpenter has his chisels and saws, a mechanic has his spanners and we webmasters have our computers. I’m not much of a woodworker (no pun intended I assure you) but I do remember my high-school woodworking teacher telling me about tool care and maintenance – keep your tools clean and in good working order and you can’t go wrong.
I bought my first PC as a pre-built system back in the late eighties but after that I built them myself. A quick count in my head (which is probably missing a few I have built for friends) tells me I’ve built over fifty PCs in the past fifteen years, and each one has had a lifespan. I’ve kept them clean, made sure they’re up-to-date and working, but eventually something goes wrong with them and it’s time to replace it.
Without our PCs we’re not very useful. Everything we do in the online world is done through our PCs. We communicate through them, we build our stores (sites) through them and we play through them. Last night I had a reminder of what it’s like when your tools decide to throw in the towel, sometimes for no reason at all.
I have bits of PCs in a box that I keep especially for emergencies. Nothing huge and you won’t find a Core 2 Duo chip in there, but you might find a few AMD boards and a few older AMD and Intel chips, which is what I found last night. Always the geek, and always looking for an excuse for a new project, I thought I’d see if they still worked. Cleaning them all up took a little while, so I thought I’d put on a baked potato in the microwave while I worked.
Half an hour later I was scrambling around the house trying to stop my kitchen catching fire.
I’m not a good cook either, and in my haste to get many things done at once I had forgotten to check the microwave and ended up nuking it a little too much. Clearing out the smoke was just a matter of opening all the windows and trying not to laugh too much at my ineptitude when it comes to basic household chores, but then I looked over at my desk and something wasn’t right.
My beloved workhorse PC had bluescreened and crashed.
Now I’ve been running XP on this system for a little over 18 months and it’s crashed ONCE. I’m no fan of Microsoft products in the normal course of things, but XP is remarkably stable for a Microsoft product and I’ve never had a problem with my PC that wasn’t a hardware fault until now.
Last night was different however. I still don’t know what happened, but it took a lot of figuring out just to get the machine to boot again. Thankfully I wasn’t too worried about my data as I backup to a second hard drive every day and then to DVD/CDR every week, so at the very most I would loose a few day’s worth of work.
It took a while, but I got it back running. If you ever have a problem with your PC in this regard, here’s a little checklist to go through before you start wondering if you have to build a new one:
- Clean it! - Doesn’t sound like much does it? It can sometimes do the trick though. Disconnect all outside cables and open up the PC. Vacuum out inside the case and then go through your IDE cables and such, reseating them all. Do the same with your memory sticks, chip and any PCI/AGP cards you have. Sometimes it’s nothing more than a slightly loose contact that’s causing the error.
- Cool It! - Has the heat increased in your work area? Maybe your PC’s internal temperature has increased, and the current cooling setup cannot handle it. Let the PC cool off for an hour or so, then try running it with the side of the case off. If it boots, think about adding a couple of fans at key positions (I highly recommend adding a fan over the hard drive bay – those things kick out a lot of heat).
- Wipe It! - Hackers are right now having a field day. There’s exploits we don’t even know about out there and it’s entirely possible that your PC just became a control hamster for a new trojan. Try booting up your PC from a WinXP CD – if it works then try rebooting from the “Last Known Working Configuration” menu (press F8 as your machine is about to boot into XP). If that works you could have some corrupted data and/or a registry problem. Consider a reinstall of XP.
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