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PC Maintenance Guide
Simple Effective Tips for
Tuning, Upgrade, & Repairing
Your Windows PC
www.WindowsSecrets.com
Upgrade, Tune-up, Repair Your Windows PC
Introduction:
As a weekly publication, Windows Secrets covers a broad swath of topics — especially
all things Windows. Some of that coverage is driven by the latest news in the world of
PCs, such as the latest malware threats or the release of Windows 7. Other topics are
generated by questions and suggestions — often sent in by readers like you.
Over the years, Windows Secrets has accumulated at vast amount of information about
Windows and Windows-related hardware and software. You can find all of it in the
WindowsSecrets.com archives. It can, however, take some time to find what you’re
looking for, because our stories are organized by issue date, not subject category.
That’s where a Windows Secrets special-edition e-book comes in; it’s a concise guide
that presents our accumulated PC wisdom — such as it is — based on a theme.
Grouping the information this way can save hours of digging through back issues. In this
format, the most essential articles and links are collected into one, easy to use reference.
For this e-book, the Windows Secrets editors pored through several years of published
information and selected the best tips in three major categories:
Each section starts with an anchor story covering the basics of a topic. That’s followed by
10 or so additional items, each with abundant direct links to the Windows Secrets
archives. (Paid-content links are shown with an asterisk.) Using these links, you can
quickly find the topics and subtopics that most interest you.
You’re welcome to read the entire e-book from front to back, but it’s most useful as a
quick-reference guide that you keep at hand. Each of the three major sections is a self-
contained unit that lets you rapidly hone in on the information you need — when you
need it.
Because each section is self-contained, some topics appear more than once. For
example, the defragmenting your hard drive tip appears both in the sections on
cleaning up your PC and improving boot times. By putting it in two sections, you won’t
have to remember which section it resides in, nor will you have to flip back and forth
through the e-book to complete the overall task.
We hope you find this thematic approach a useful complement to the normal flow of
diverse information appearing every week in the Windows Secrets Newsletter. We’d also
like to give a special thanks to Fred Langa for providing most of the leg work needed to
put this e-book together.
Happy computing!
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Table of contents:
Seven simple steps for optimizing your new Win7 setup ............. 6
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Let’s start with one of the worst problems that can befall a PC: the system hangs during
the initial startup — or doesn't even try to boot.
For this stop-you-in-your-tracks event, here's what to do and how to do it, as explained by
Lincoln Spector’s “What to do when your PC gets hosed:”
If Windows can't start in the usual way, you may be able to boot and repair it in a simpler
mode.
Turn on the computer, and put your finger on the F8 key. The moment the first on-screen
text disappears, just before Windows begins to load, press the key. Pressed at the
precise moment, the F8 key should bring up the Windows Boot Menu. Depending on the
PC, it may take a few tries — with reboots — to get the timing right.
That's assuming, of course, that your PC and Windows are both in good-enough
condition to get this far. If they're not, skip this section and go on to the next one.
If you get to the menu, select Last Known Good Configuration. This option runs System
Restore, which attempts to return Windows to a previous working condition.
Should that effort not fix the problem, reboot, press F8 again, select Safe Mode, and try
running System Restore from there.
If you can load Safe Mode but System Restore doesn't do the trick, try running a good
diagnostic and repair program (such as CCleaner) while still in Safe Mode. (If you don't
already have CCleaner installed, I recommend the portable version download.)
Still not fixed? Running in Safe Mode at least lets you back up your data — a task that's
arguably more important than rebooting the PC in serious situations. Plug an external
drive into a USB port and drag important folders (such as your documents, photos,
music, and videos) onto the external drive.
If you can't boot into Safe Mode, recovering your data files becomes an even more
important job. You may be able to access your hard drive and recover these files via a
bootable (also known as live) Linux CD or flash drive.
Booting Linux does more than help you recover your data: it helps you diagnose your
trouble. If you can successfully boot this way but can't access the hard drive after you're
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in Linux, you know that the problem lies in your hard drive. If you can't boot at all, you've
got a hardware problem that doesn't involve the hard drive. But if the whole process is a
success, you've got a Windows difficulty, not a hardware one.
There are a lot of live variations of Linux out there, but I recommend Puppy Linux
(info/download). It's not the most powerful one by a long shot, but it's small, fast, and
easy for Windows users. (See Figure 10.)
Figure 10. Puppy Linux gives you access to your hard-drive files when
Windows won't.
Puppy downloads as an .iso file, which is basically an image backup of a CD. Double-
click it; there's a good chance any program that burns a bootable CD will load the file and
let you burn it to disc. If that doesn't happen, you need to download and install an app
such as the free ISO Recorder.
If you don't have an optical drive and therefore can't boot from a CD, see my July 8, 2010
Insider Tricks story, "Rescue Windows with a bootable flash drive," for instructions for
putting your Puppy on a flash drive.
After you prepare the CD or flash drive, insert it into your optical drive or USB port and try
to start your machine. If it fails, make sure your PC is set to boot from this device. When
you first turn on your computer, you might see an onscreen message telling you to press
a particular key for a boot menu (which is not the same as the Windows Boot Menu I
discussed earlier). Press that key to choose the right device.
The boot menu message may or may not appear, but you'll almost certainly find
instructions to press a particular key for Setup. In your PC's setup environment, which I
can't describe in detail because it varies from one computer to another, you'll find options
to control the devices it boots from and in what order. Look again for a boot menu. You
want your optical drive or USB ports at the top of that list.
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After you successfully boot into Linux, you can click the hard-drive icon (or one of the
hard-drive icons) in the lower-left corner to bring up the drive's contents. If the drive
opens properly, find the files you need, plug in an external drive (you'll get a new icon, of
a flash drive), open that drive, and drag folders from one location to the other.
So what do you do if you can't boot from a CD or flash drive? Unless you have an
extremely recent backup, your first priority is to recover your files.
Open your computer and remove the drive. (If you don't know how, check the manual.)
After you remove it, you need to connect the drive to another computer — but not as the
main, bootable drive. If the other computer is a desktop machine, you can open it and
plug the drive into a second SATA or IDE connector. If that sounds intimidating, or if the
PC is a laptop, buy an adapter such as the Bytecc USB 2.0 to IDE/SATA Adapter Kit
(info), which effectively turns an internal hard drive temporarily into an external one. I've
seen them on sale for as little as U.S. $17.
If you can't read the hard drive that way and there are files on it you really need, you
have to take it to a professional data-recovery service. Kroll Ontrack (info) and
DriveSavers (info) are the best known, but because I've never figured out a good,
practical way to test these services, I can't honestly say they're better than their cheaper
competitors.
Beyond hard-drive issues, what do you do if your PC won't boot from the hard drive, a
CD, or a flash drive? If you're comfortable enough with the inside of your PC to open it up
and check connections and then test and swap components, go ahead. Otherwise, take it
to a professional.
If Safe Mode didn't boot or didn't fix the problem, but you were able to boot into Linux and
access the drive, it's time to try the tools on a standard, retail Windows CD or DVD.
But if you're using the version of Windows that came with your computer, you probably
don't have an actual Windows disc. That's okay. You can make a bootable CD that can
do everything that an XP, Vista, or Windows 7 disc can do — except install an operating
system.
Create the CD and boot it. At the main screen, press r for Repair to launch the Recovery
Console. This brings up a DOS-like, command-prompt interface with several useful tools.
The best are these:
Bootcfg: This is used for viewing and repairing the boot.ini file.
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Diskpart: This one manages partitions, but be warned: it also destroys them.
The tools on the Vista and Windows 7 discs are much friendlier than the XP versions. But
unless you have retail copies of the operating system, you must still make a disc.
To make the Vista recovery disc, download the appropriate .iso file, available on the
NeoSmart Technologies site, and burn it to a CD. You need BitTorrent installed to
properly download this file.
Windows 7 comes with a tool for creating its recovery disc. Click the Start orb, type
backup, and select Backup your computer. In the resulting window's left pane, click
Create a system repair disc. You'll be prompted to insert a blank disc.
When you boot from either the Vista or the Windows 7 disc, the boot process just might
find your problem and offer to fix it before anything else happens. If not, or if this doesn't
work, follow the prompts to the System Recovery Options menu. Everything is pretty
obvious from there.
If your luck is good, you won't get to this point. But if all else fails, you're left with
reinstalling Windows — which most of us know is a long, boring, and sometimes scary
process. Check out my how-to story, "Reinstall Windows without losing your data," for
instructions.
All the above can go a little more smoothly if you gather some recovery tools in advance
of actually needing them. For example, see these:
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Networking problems
Sleep/suspend/hibernate issues
Driver problems
Beyond Chkdsk.exe
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The Windows Secrets Newsletter brings you essential tricks for running Windows, IE,
Firefox, Windows Update, and more — weekly, free.
Tighten your Facebook privacy settings 10 great “Do these first” tweaks for Windows 7
Your next PC: thinking beyond the desktop Freeware outdoes Windows’ built-in tools
Hotmail’s social networking busts your privacy Avoid the security risk of shortened URLs
Preparing XP for the long haul Windows Live shares your Messenger contacts
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