How to Respond to Illegal Operation Errors in Windows

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Dave Andrews. Today, I'm going to show you how to respond to illegal operation errors in Windows. Let's go to our computer, and I'll show you a picture of an illegal operation error. This is an error that you might receive on your computer when you're using a specific program. Basically, what this is showing is that that program has somehow caused Windows to become unstable, therefore it closed that program. It's a good idea to keep track of what program you're using when you receive the errors. But I'm going to show you a couple of general things that you can do. Let's just click on our Start button, and then click on the Computer. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to first scan our hard drive for errors. And sometimes, as a hard drive starts going bad, it...bits will get corrupted within programs, and that'll cause them to generate errors. So let's right-click on our C drive and then go to Properties. Click on the Tools tab, and then we want to click under error checking on Check Now. Click "Continue" because on Vista you have to be an administrator. Now, I want to do both of these options. This will automatically fix any problems it encounters, and the second will scan for...or scan the entire hard drive and check any bad blocks it encounters. Just click the Start button there. Now, it's going to fail, and it's because you are currently using your C drive, therefore you can't scan it right now. So what it'll want you to do is reboot and then it'll scan when your computer is booting the next time. So click that "Schedule disk check" and then restart your computer. I'm going to cancel out of that for now. Next, we're going to run a command line option. Click your Start button, and right above it, type CMD. Then right-click on the command line up here and click "Run as administrator." Now, what we're going to do is we're going to run a system file checker, SFC, space, slash, scannow. That will scan your Windows installation for any corrupted files and it'll fix those files. These are a couple good tips for how to respond to illegal operations. My name's Dave Andrews, and I've just told you how to respond to illegal operation errors in Windows."