Know If Your Computer Crashed

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to know if your computer has crashed. Let's go to our computer here and the very first thing that you're going to want to check is is your mouse working? If I have my little mouse pad here that controls my mouse, if I can move this and my mouse cursor on the screen is not going anywhere at all, chances are that my computer has completely locked up. I can press keys on the keyboard and I can do anything but one of the very first indicators that you're going to run across is that mouse just stops working. Now if you can see my computer screen here I'm going to show you a couple other things to check. Sometimes a program will lock up and not your entire computer. The way you can tell that, well let's say I have a program right here. If my computer or this program; what's inside of this program stops responding completely, my mouse is still moving around but this program's not doing what it's designed to do. If I can just click this little X up here and I'm going to go ahead and click it. As you can see that program went away normally. If by chance that program stayed up on the screen even after I click the X chances are just that program has crashed and not my entire computer. Eventually if you keep clicking the X the title of that program will change to: not responding and Windows will pop up asking you if you want to kill the program. It's usually going to be a program that crashes as opposed to your entire computer. Now the next thing you can do is check to see if there's another process on your computer that's hogging up the CPU or the processor and making it seem like it is locked up. The way you can check that is to right click on your task bar down here, we're going to pull up the task manager. Now click on the processes tab. And there's a CPU area in here as well as an image area, image name. This image name tells you the name of a program that running and the CPU tells you how much processoring power it's using percentage wise. Like this program right here's using 5% of my processor. I can sort by CPU. If I had one up here that was hogging up 90 or 95%, chances are that program is making it seem like my computers locked up. Now that excludes the system process. You'll see one that's called system idol process, that one is supposed to be real high. So if I want to kill a process I'll just clicked; click on it and select end process. And if it's one of those that's hogging up my PC chances are my computer will start to respond much faster. My name's Dave Andrews. And I've just told you how to tell if your computer has crashed."