Computer Repair Tips

Overheating and related shutdown problems are very common in laptops, especially in home use.  Common symptoms include some or all from this list;
- Laptop is extremely hot to the touch, especially around the fan area
- Fan seems to be running constantly, and at high speed
- Laptop shuts off by itself when doing nothing
- Laptop shuts off when playing games
- These heating or shutdown problems become worse over time, rather than getting better.

In around 1 in 10 cases, there is a fault with the cooling hardware. By this I mean either a mechanical failure with the fan where it can no longer spin, or spins slowly, or a motherboard electrical fault which exhibits itself by not telling the fan to spin fast enough to cool the laptop.

However 9 out of 10 cases of overheating are caused by an airflow blockage. In these cases, the fan is spinning as fast as it can, but if the hot air is obstructed from reaching the outside world, a heat build-up occurs and the laptop takes the safety precaution of turning itself off, rather than allowing permenant damage to occur. (more…)

Technorati Tags: laptop repair, laptop ventilation

If you receive a phone call claiming to be from ‘Microsoft’ or someone claiming to work on their behalf, telling you that you have a virus on your computer which they will help you fix over the phone, It Is A Scam.  Hang up the phone, do not let them have remote control access to your computer and do not give them any money.

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Technorati Tags: desktop advice, laptop advice, scam, virus

Over time, the hard disk on your computer can become very disorganised.  Files get written to the disk, some get deleted, more files get written, and so on.  Every time a file gets deleted, the space it occupied is available to be reused.  But if the new file you want to write is too large to be written to that space, what happens is that a piece of the file gets written there, and another piece gets written somewhere else.  This process of breaking files up into smaller pieces when writing them to the hard disk is known as Fragmentation.  The files are said to be Fragmented.

As more files get written and deleted, this fragmentation of the hard disk increases.  More files are being broken up into smaller chunks, making the hard disk work harder trying to read back all the fragments.

Although modern fast hard disks are very capable of reading all of these fragments when you request the file, it is never quite as fast as being able to read the file in one piece from start to finish.  So the purpose of running a defrag program is to Defragment your hard disk.  In other words, it will reorganise all the pieces of files (fragments) so that they are joined up into one piece again.  The end result can be, in badly fragmented computers, a noticeable improvement in speed when reading files from the hard disk. (more…)

Technorati Tags: hard disk, repair tool, video

Here are a few external hard disks that we recommend. At the time of writing, all of these products are available at Amazon.co.uk (more…)

What is a Reflow?

The term ‘reflow’ describes a process of briefly melting (reflowing) the solder on an electrical circuit board.

Why would you perform a Reflow on a laptop?

The solder used in laptop motherboards tends to degrade over time, becoming brittle and weak. It can change from being a solid block of solder into more of a honeycomb structure. This weaker solder joint can fracture causing tiny broken connections in the circuit, invisible to the naked eye. The idea behind performing a reflow is that it melts the solder, allowing it to form a solid block again and joining up the electrical circuit. (more…)

Technorati Tags: laptop repair, motherboard, video

CrystalDiskInfo is a great little free tool for checking the general health of your hard drive.  It works by reading the S.M.A.R.T. data off your hard disk and displays it in a simple graphical format.  It can work with internal or external hard disks, with either IDE (ATA/PATA) or SATA connectors, and it even works for hard disks plugged in via USB.

Each of the S.M.A.R.T. parameters has a threshold, beyond which it could indicate a drive starting to fail.  If CrystalDiskInfo determines that any parameter is showing potential problems, it will highlight that row in the results table. (more…)

Technorati Tags: hard disk, repair tool

If you find that your CD or DVD drive no longer appears in My Computer and you can’t read or write to disks, there is a known Windows registry fix that could help you.

Of course, you should first check that the drive is properly connected, just in case.

This Windows registry fix is based on a problem that can occur related to CD/DVD writing software.  Unnecessary registry entries get created which interfere with how Windows communicates to your CD/DVD drive. (more…)

Technorati Tags: desktop repair, dvd drive, laptop repair, registry, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP

In our repair shop, we are sometimes asked by customers if there is any harm in shutting down their computer by just pressing the power button for a few seconds, rather than going through the Windows shutdown procedure.

As far as the customer in concerned, the end result appears to be the same, the computer shuts down. In fact, from their point of view, holding the power button for a few seconds appears to shut down the computer immediately, whereas a proper Windows shutdown takes maybe 20 to 30 seconds. So is it a good idea to do this?

To get straight to the point, it is a very, very bad idea to shut down a computer by holding the power button. (more…)

Technorati Tags: desktop advice, hard disk, laptop advice

You should find that System Restore is turned on by default, creating restore points automatically on a regular basis, but in case you want to create a manual System Restore point, perhaps just after a virus cleanup, here’s how to do it.

There are a lot of different routes to the System Restore setup screen in Windows 7, but this is the way I use.

Click on the Start button and right click on Computer. Select Properties from the context menu and the System window will open. (more…)

Technorati Tags: system restore, Windows 7

After installing and setting up a fresh copy of Windows, there are times when you check the Device Manager and you see the little yellow exclamation point meaning a driver hasn’t been installed for a device.

If the driver isn’t on a driver disk, and maybe you don’t have a copy of the driver because the original hard disk was broken – what do you do? The device just shows up as unknown modem, or unknown media device or something similar.

What you can do is check the properties of the device, find out its signature and look it up on a great little website www.PCIDatabase.com. (more…)

Technorati Tags: drivers, installing Windows