It's a hard life when you're the family PC expert. Visit any relative at Christmas and you've barely time to get through the door before they're telling you about the PC crashes, the unreadable CD, the forgotten password, and all the other computer problems they've saved up since your last visit.
There's no way to stop this, unfortunately, but you can at least solve their issues quickly by building the perfect portable troubleshooting toolkit, a collection of problem-solving utilities that you can take anywhere.
It's easy. Just grab one USB flash drive (any cheap 4GB model will do), add our selection of free tools and you're ready to tackle just about anything.
Find out more
Your first task when investigating any strange PC is to find out more about it. What's the operating system, which CPU is installed, how much RAM, how many hard drives? Speccy is a helpful system information tool from Piriform (the people behind popular system tools like CCleaner and Defraggler), and it'll quickly tell you everything you need to know about your target system.
Get antivirus help
When a family member's PC is behaving strangely then it's wise to check for malware, especially if they've no antivirus protection. Get your USB toolkit started with portable copies of ClamWin and McAfee Avert Stinger and you'll be equipped to deal with the most common threats.
If your family member has installed one of those annoying malware specimens that pretends to be an antivirus tool, then you could also try to kill it with Remove Fake Antivirus.
This tiny program comes in a single portable executable file and completely removes most of the biggest dangers.
Meanwhile Norton's free Security Scan will only detect threats, not remove them, but it's still worth including, if only for extra reassurance. Visit the Security Scan page, download and install it on your PC. Copy the Norton Security Scan folder from the Program Files folder to your USB drive, and you should then be able to launch the program (nss.exe) to check your target PC.
Explore software problems
If the faulty PC doesn't have a virus then maybe there's a problem with its configuration. FixWin is designed to fix all kinds of common Windows issues, covering Explorer, web and connectivity issues, Media Player and more - just find your problem and click Fix to solve it.
If there's a deeper issue then you'll want to find out more about how this PC is set up. Use AutoRuns to see what's launched when the PC boots, then turn to Process Explorer to discover exactly what's running now.
Fix your codecs
If the PC you're visiting won't play videos or audio files correctly then it may be because there are broken references to codecs or filters in the Registry.
You could try to solve this by installing a new codec pack, but that's risky, and may cause more problems than it solves. A better idea is simply to run the Codec Tweak Tool, a stand-alone version of the troubleshooting utility that comes bundled with the K-Lite Codec Pack. The program will scan for various codec and filter problems, then report on and try to fix anything it finds.
Restore hard drive data
Your relatives are panicking as they've deleted something important, but fortunately you're here to save the day. With a copy of Recuva (grab the portable version) you'll be able to restore data from hard drives, memory cards and MP3 players, and its deep scan mode can recover files where other undelete tools will fail.
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james_stewart12325
February 14th 2011
1. <strong>PC Hardware Troubleshooting Tools</strong>
Due to the low cost of the some of the hardware components, it’s usually not advisable to repair the IC level problems of the components, instead they should be replaced. The repair cost of the component will most likely be high as compared to the actual cost of the component. There are some very excellent hardware problem detection tools that are very helpful in identifying and isolating the problems. These <a href="http://www.thewindowssupport.com">tools<a/> included Multi meter, Cable Tester
3 types of troubleshooting
Troubleshooting with Multimeter
Testing tools can help in isolating the hardware or software problems and digital multimeter is a most important <a href="http://www.thewindowssupport.com">tool</a> for the electronic troubleshooting. Digital Multimeter and other electronic test instruments are available in analog and digital form and these instruments can be used to measure the electrical values of the voltage, current in miliamperes and resistance in ohms.
Troubleshooting with Cable Testers
The most common hardware related computer networking problem is the bad cabling and RJ-45 connectors. There are a number of devices, designed for testing the network communication cabling. These devices include continuity tester, time domain reflect meter and cabling testers. Data cabling testers are designed to perform a number of different types of tests on the UTP/STP and coaxial cables.
Software Diagnostics Routines
Many disk based diagnostic methods can check the system and identify the problems by running the number of tests on the different areas of the system hardware. These tests produce the visual reports and error messages to identify the nature of the problem. The most common software troubleshooting routines check the computer’s memory, keyboard, monitor, system processor, and hard disk’s speed.
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