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Performing a Tune-Up on your computer

Performing a Tune-Up isn’t complicated.  All you need are the right tools.  In this article I will show you which tools to use and how to use them.

By the time you are finished, your computer should be running much better! Continue reading

Speed Up Your PC or Laptop

Is your computer running slow?  Does it take ages to start up and get on the internet?  Does it take a long time to start up a program?  Does it seem like it is working hard but not getting anywhere?  If so, you probably have the classic ‘My Computer’s Too Slow’ complaint.  But fear not, all is not lost.  I’m going to take you through some very basic steps that should make a noticable difference to your computer performance.  These are all steps that your computer repair shop will be doing if you take it in for a tune-up.  But you could save yourself a bit of money and Do It Yourself. Continue reading

Clean Up Your PC with CCleaner

CCleaner is a fantastic, free tool that is really effective tool to clean up your computer.  There are a number of excellent features that can be safely used by anyone, including file clean-up, registry clean-up and startup program checking. Continue reading

MalwareBytes Anti-Malware

For a free anti-malware tool, MalwareBytes Anti-Malware is as good as you can possibly get.  It is so easy to use and it can pick up threats and potential issues that can be ignored or missed by your anti-virus program.  I would thoroughly recommend this tool to anyone, from computer novices to computer repair experts. Continue reading

Laptop Repair Videos, Podcasts & Tips

Anyone that has worked in the Computer Repair field will know that laptops are a very different animal than your average desktop PC.  Although they share a lot of similar concepts, in terms of hardware, repairing them is a whole different art.  This article includes a lot of laptop specific tips that I used including laptop repair videos.

When I started in computer repair, it was laptops that I was primarily interested in.  It was more of a niche market that I thought would be good to get into.  So I bought a few broken/spares/repairs laptops off ebay to practice taking them apart, and see what was inside.

You very quickly learn that although the general concept of taking them apart tends to be quite similar, each model of laptop can have it’s own problems.  Tiny screws hidden under rubber bumpers, cables that have to be fed through a hole in the motherboard, the list goes on.. Continue reading

Recommended books for Computer Repair Technicians

There are loads of books out there providing help and guides for computer and laptop repair.  These are a few that I would highly recommend from my own experience.  If you want to learn laptop repair or computer repair, these books are a great place to start. Continue reading

Fix Laptop Overheating Shutdown Problem

This article describes a common overheating laptop scenario along with a fix that works.

Overheating laptop and related shutdown problems are very common in notebook computers, especially in home use.  Common symptoms of laptop overheating include some or all from this list;

  • Laptop is extremely hot to the touch, especially around the fan exhaust area
  • Laptop fan is constantly running at high speed
  • Laptop shuts down by itself when doing nothing
  • Laptop shuts down when playing games
  • These laptop overheating or shutdown problems become worse over time, rather than getting better.

In around 1 in 10 cases of laptop overheating, there is potentially a phyical fault with the cooling hardware.

By this I mean either a mechanical failure with the fan where it can no longer spin, or it spins too slowly, or a motherboard electrical fault which exhibits itself by not telling the fan to spin fast enough to cool the laptop. Continue reading

Defragment your hard disk easily using JKDefrag

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. Continue reading