How to Fix a Computer

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to fix a computer. There's many problems that we run into when we're using a computers. A lot of them are the operating systems. Which will in a lot of cases, will be Windows or Macintosh. Many of them are the programs that run on the top of the operating system. This is where you'll get a lot of error messages, crashing programs and things like that. What you need to do, to fix your PC. Is first analyze what's going on with it. Is it hardware? whether it could be a boot up, your screen going blank. Are the fans blowing real hard, making a lot of noise. Where's the software? Are you getting error messages? Can you not log in? Problems such as that. I'm going to show you how to fix a couple of the software problems. Or at least, where to look at. To avoid problems in the future. A lot of problems you're going to have from a computer, are going to come from programs that run in the background. That you don't know are running. You'll get error messages from those. So see those, just click on the start button. Then right above here, type msconfig. On Windows XP, you have click on run. And then type msconfig. Then what we're going to do is, we're going to startup tab, here. And this is going to list out all the programs that are running, when your computer starts up. Now these programs, they don't pop up on my screen. But they are running. And they can cause crashes and error messages to come. So what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to un-check some of these. You know, I don't really need them. And then I'm going to click apply. Another thing you can do to troubleshoot your computer, is to see what actually is running. Let's right click somewhere on the Task Manager or on the Task bar. And then click on Task Manager. This brings up a list of all the programs that are running. If your computer's running extremely slow. Sort it by the CPU. And you can see, what task are you using in your processor. And you can see here, the percentage of the CPU that you're using. If one of them is using a hundred percent, all the time. That's what's hammering down your computer. And you would select and hit, end process. The System Idle Process, you can ignore it. It's a built in thing. My name is Dave Andrews. And I've just showed you how to fix a computer."