How to Fix a Corrupt System: Windows XP or OS

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Dave Casuto, and I am the director of San Francisco Computer Tutors here in San Francisco, California. In this video we are going to show you how to work with corrupt files you find in Windows XP or Windows Vista, or even for Macs. The first place I like to start is going to the registry files of your operating system. So a lot of the instructions that are in your computer are in the registry. So if you have any viruses or malware or spyware they are going to attack your registry. If you have old files just sitting around like dead weight, if you've got temporary files, and just stuff that you have installed that are just kind of sitting there and you are not using them, basically it's going to be in your registry. So one of the first things that I do is, and I work with a software program called Reg Defense. There are other ones like Reg Pure and some other ones, and I basically just, I think it was about thirty bucks to purchase it, it's more than worth it. And I run this about once every month or so, and I just scan my computer, and then it's just going to basically go through all these different parts of my computer, scan it, and then see if any of these things can be cleaned up. So I can start the scan, and you can see here it's just going to run, run, run through every single part of these. And it's going to show me all the different things that are possibly corrupted or possibly, see right away see it's found an error. And it's been about two week, even less than that since I did my last one. Now while this is running let me show me another thing that I do, and I just a normal disc clean up. If you have never done a disc clean up before, I would highly recommend it. So in Windows you go to start, and then you are going to want to go to all programs, and then accessories. And then accessories will open up and then you are going to want to go to your systems panel. So I've got a lot of programs here, it takes a little while. So you go to your systems tools, and then you are going to go to your disc clean up. And your disc clean up is going to take care of a bunch of different stuff. Like it's going to clean out your recycle bin, which is nice, just an automated tool to do that. It's going to take care of your temporary Internet files, etc. So now you can see here this window pops up, and it's basically telling me that it's scanning my computer looking for things to take care of. So as you can see I'm really just doing spring cleaning here, I'm taking care of, I just clean up right and Windows knows where to go for that. And the registry defense that's taking care of that, so you also want to run a virus scan in addition to that. There are free ones out there, the one that I recommend the most is AVG, which is anti-virus grisoft, it's free, and it's very, very effective. Very, very powerful. Another one is called Avira, A-V-I-R-A. You just go right to their websites, and I recommend these over any of the paid ones to tell you the truth, because they really don't slow down your system quite as much. And they are free. So doing all these things will prevent any kind of corruption that you have, it will even take care of any corruption that you have. So I would suggest doing this as soon as you can, and doing it regularly. So you can see here this is running a background, this could take all day, but will end our tutorial. Alright well I hope you had as much fun as I did. Feel free to contact me anytime at dave@deyec, that's deyec.com, and you can check me out on the web also at deyec.com."