Situation: Desktop PC stops working for no apparent reason. Doesn’t power on. Tested power supply, power button, CPU, RAM, all fine.

Solution: CMOS battery. PC would boot if the battery was removed. If it is inserted, system doesn’t power on. Replaced battery, but problem persists. Perhaps there is corrosion somewhere near the battery socket which causes this. Left battery out.

When starting windows you get this message at the login prompt:

“When trying to update a password, this return status indicates that the value provided as the current password is not correct.”

SOLUTION: Replace SECURITY/SAM file in C:\WINDOWS\system32\config

If you need more help with any of this post please leave feedback

Background

Cloning a hard drive means making an exact copy of a disks contents so that you can either backup or migrate your disk. This post is about cloning a windows partition so that you can run it from a different PC with different hardware on it. There is a useful section at the end, which will help you get into windows if you’ve forgotten to sysprep.

Overview

An easy piece of software to use is Ultrasoft Snapshot. Then use Microsoft sysprep utility to prepare the system for cloning. Use ’snapshot’ to clone the partition to a backup hard drive. Restore the backup to a new disk.

If you haven’t run sysprep, and you no longer have access to the old machine, there’s some help to get you going in the trouble shooting section.

Microsoft sysprep

Microsoft have a page on sysprep. I forgot to use sysprep (hence this post) so you’ll have to google this section. Good Luck.

Ultrasoft Drive Snapshot

Use the ’snapshot’ software from a startup disk in your original machine (eg bartpe) or by installing the original hard drive in another pc (let’s call it the host pc) and running ’snapshot’ on the host machine. This is required because snapshot needs exclusive access to the source hard drive partition (the one you’re cloning), so you can’t be running windows off the drive you’re cloning whilst cloning.

You need the same amount of space free on your target hard drive partition as the source partition. If you have alot of free space on the source partition, it might help to resize it, eg using Partition Magic.

Use the ’snapshot’ program to extract the cloned partition to the target hard drive. You can then boot into your target machine and finish. If you have trouble booting, mark the partition as active (can be done from boot cds, or installing drive in different machine and using the computer manager from the windows control panel.) Make sure the MBR has a working boot loader (eg use fixmbr from windows installation cd restore mode to reinstall bootloader.)

Troubleshooting ie forgetting to sysprep

If you cloned the partition and tried to boot it without sysprep’ing before cloning you will probably get problems starting the computer. It either restarts endlessly, or you get a blue screen (STOP 0×0000007B messages indicating problem with boot drive).

This usually happens because windows has problems starting in the new machine, as it is still setup for the old machine. One way to solve this problem is to install windows on your target machine in a new & empty partition. Then you need to copy over the system/sam/ security files from C:\windows\system32\config over to the problematic install. This will effectively overwrite the data windows keeps about the system hardware. I already had a windows installation on my target machine, so I copied these files over, and in my case this allowed me to boot into the cloned windows partition!

The only problem then remaining is that you might have registry entries in your old config files that are required by the software you had installed. These have to be manually sorted out by mounting the hives in regedit and copying the required data out. This is possible for a few registry entries (eg Windows Services entries etc.) but it’s probably too much hassle otherwise.

TODO

My problems were solved after copying over the configuration files, and fixing a few registry entries.

If you have time, instead of overwriting the entire SAM/SECURITY/SYSTEM hives, only overwrite the sections containing hardware information. Which sections are those? No idea, you’ll need to find out. Copy out enough registry entries to get it to boot (may only be those regarding chipset/graphics card/hd.)

Otherwise, find a guide on sysprep’ing after cloning and try that. Oh and let me know if that works.

MEncoder  is a useful media encoder that comes with MPlayer The Movie Player

To use, you’ll need to download and install MPLAYER as well as the extra plugins. You may also need Real Player, Quicktime, Windows Media Player installed (or an alternative.)

OK I’m always having to lookup the mencoder flags for encoding video files, so heres a useful example:

c:\mplayer\>mencoder.exe input.file -of mpeg -ovc lavc -oac lavc
                  -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:acodec:mp2 -o output.file

of = Output File        ovc = Output Video Codec

The rest of the options can be looked up.

This problem occurs when windows is trying to show you a preview picture of your video, whilst you are trying to delete the file. So then you get a message telling you the file is still in use and the delete operation fails. Solution? Stop windows from showing you thumbnail images of your videos.

Start -> Run -> regedit
Edit -> Find

In the search box type this:

{87D62D94-71B3-4b9a-9489-5FE6850DC73E}

Tick the box titled ‘Keys’ and untick the others. It should find the key for ‘AVI Properties handler.’ Right click the key from the left window pane (with the folder tree view) and click export. Choose a file name to export the key to, and click OK. Now you can delete the key you just exported. If anything goes wrong, you can double click the .reg file you just created to restore the key.

You can also delete the following keys:

{40C3D757-D6E4-4b49-BB41-0E5BBEA28817}
Video Media Properties Handler

{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}
Video thumbnail extractor

Download MSDE2000

This article is about .MDF and .LDF files. These files are created by Microsoft SQL Server, and if you have some of these, and you want to view their contents read on.

The files I had originated from a Microsoft SQL Desktop Edition 2000 (MSDE) server. I’m assuming these instructions will work for other versions as well.

You can download the 42MB MSDE 2000 Release A file from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=413744D1-A0BC-479F-BAFA-E4B278EB9147&displaylang=en

Install MSDE2000

If you run the file you saved it will ask you to choose a folder to extract the setup files to. Please select a folder, or just click next. The files will unpack.

Open a command prompt from Start ->All Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt

It will show you something like this:

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\Documents and Settings\username>

Type the following in and press enter:

C:\Documents and Settings\username> cd C:\the\folder\you\extracted\your\files\to\goes\here
C:\the\folder\i\extracted\my\files\to> setup.exe SAPWD=YOUR_PASSWORD_GOES_HERE

This is the type of window that should show next

Setup will commence, and you should have your server installed.

Graphical Administration Tool

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c039a798-c57a-419e-acbc-2a332cb7f959

I tried this, but couldn’t get it to work. I wasn’t using IIS. Good luck.

Command Line Administration using OSQL

OK back to basics. osql.exe is in this folder:

%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Binn\

By default this is:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Binn\

Open a command prompt and cd into that directory:

C:\SQL Server\80\Tools\Binn\>osql /?
usage: osql              [-U login id]          [-P password]
etc

Read the stuff that it prints out here.

The -E’ switch means trusted connection, so we’ll use that to login

C:\SQL Server\80\Tools\Binn\>osql -E

1> sp_help
1> go

A whole load of text will fly by. This is the output of the sp_help command. As you see, you use ‘go’ to execute the commands you type in at the prompt.

Attaching the MDF/LDF Files:

To view your MDF/LDF files  you need to attach the database files to the server. The commands are as follows:

1>EXEC sp_attach_db @dbname = N'CHOOSE_DATABASE_NAME_AND_TYPE_IT_HERE',
1>   @filename1 = N'C:\YOUR_FILE.mdf',
1>   @filename2 = N'C:\YOUR_FILE.ldf'
1>go

To view info on the databases currently attached, you can use these commands:

1>select * from sysdatabases
1>go
1>select * from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES
1>go

You can now use SQL statements as follows:

1>USE YOUR_DATABASE_NAME
1>select * from YOUR_TABLE_NAME
1>go

If you want to output the result of your SQL query in a file use:

C:\...\Binn>osql /E /d YOUR_DB_NAME /Q "select * from YOUR_TABLE_NAME" -o outputfile.txt

If you want to do it using a host/username/password to login:

C:\...\Binn>osql /U sa /P YOUR_PASSWORD /d YOUR_DB_NAME /S your.server.name.or.ip.address /Q "select * from YOUR_TABLE" -o outputfile.txt

Some more useful commands:

1>sp_helpdb mydb
1>go

1>EXEC sp_grantlogin ‘Test’
1>EXEC sp_grantdbaccess ‘Test’, ‘database_name’
1>EXEC sp_addlogin ‘test’,'hello’
1>EXEC sp_password ‘OLDPASS’, ‘NEWPASS’,'Test’

Have fun.

Whilst installing .NET framework 3.0 Service Pack 1, I accidentally pulled the power cord on the laptop. When I started up again, it kept giving me the 2711 error message.

Cleaning the temporary file folders didn’t solve this. The answer was stowed away on a forum found via google:

• Go into Start Menu -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove programs
• Find the  ’.NET framework 3.0′ entry and click the ‘change‘ button
• The setup will run, you should select the repair option.
• Once that completes, you can rerun the SP1 setup and it should work fine.

Basic Checks

Some laptop CPU fans don’t spin up on power up

So I had a laptop which stopped working for apparently no reason. None of the lights came on except for the charger light when the battery & charger were connected. The power button didn’t do anything.

I assumed it was dead because the CPU fan wasn’t spinning up when pressing the power button (like in desktop computers.) I tried opening the laptop up, removing and connecting everything up outside of the case, which then got it working (second time round, I’d done this once before and had no luck the first time.) The CPU fan still doesn’t spin up at boot time, so it’s pretty hard trouble shooting the issue.

Something you can try first is to find the documentation for your laptop/notebook. Go online and find the manuals for your machine. Try to find the service manual as well. This can be very useful.

First of all, check your battery. If you’re lucky and you have a friend/neighbour who has the same kind of laptop, you can test your battery with their machine. Otherwise, get hold of a multimeter and check out the voltages and currents coming out of the battery terminals. Sometimes (for example on an IBM Thinkpad) the expected voltages/currents are written in the service manual. This way, you can tell if the battery is dead or not. If your battery isn’t dead, it should allow you to start the laptop, even if the charger is having problems.

Check your charger. Again, if you have a friend/neighbour with the same machine, ask them to test the charger. It’s possible, but not very safe to check if you’re getting any voltages/currents out of the charger terminals with a multimeter, just to see if it’s supplying any power or not. Check if the fuse has blown on the charger’s plug.

Sometimes your charger is fine, but the charger connector on the laptop is messed up. In this case, you’ll have to wiggle the wire around, and hold it until the charging light shows. Make sure the battery is plugged in when you do this, otherwise the charging light wont show at all. Sometimes, a bit of pressure upwards/downwards or sideways does the trick and gets your charging light showing again.

If you are sure your battery isn’t dead, your battery holds charge, and/or your charger is working, then you can try the power button. Try holding it down for a couple of seconds, and wait around 10 seconds to see if it’s having any effect.

If your power button isn’t helping, you can try reseating the RAM module. You should consult  your manual on doing this. OR Google it.

If reseating RAM doesn’t help, you may have a problem with the graphics card/display. Some machines overheat after long periods and this screws up some of the parts which get hot, such as the graphics chip.

Surgery

Your laptop isn’t worth spending alot of money on to have it repaired? Take it apart and have a closer look. You’ll need a service manual to do this the first time, because some of the screws and tabs and stuff are hard to spot, but you can get the thing open without it if you try hard or google. Keep a log of the order in which you take out screws, and keep each group of screws seperate. For example, I’d write,

Step 1: remove 3 screws securing keyboard to top of case, and then place them together

This way it makes it alot easier to put it back together, you just follow the steps backwards. Don’t lose/mix up the screws, you won’t remember which ones go where. Trust me.

Having a working battery and charger is useful when you’ve opened up the laptop, and want to check if the board is fried or not, by checking the lights on the laptop.

Dead Laptop Came Back To Life Thank God

I just took the whole laptop apart, out of the casing and connected up the battery and charger. This is probably quite a dangerous thing to do. It can easily short out and screw the board/components.

I was getting an orange charger light if I pushed the charger cable down in the charger socket. There was a green light with a plug icon above it which flickered green when I applied power. When I tried the power button, I got nothing.

When I took it apart, there was a small daughter board attached to the motherboard, which I’ll call the power board, into which the charger went. This board was connected to the main mother board via a connector with about 20-40 golden pins.On my machine this was the problem. When this power board was connected, and held up at an angle, and the charger cable pushed down, I began getting a green power light.

At this point I connected the hard drive, RAM and keyboard, and the hard drive began whirring. I tried to boot the laptop with the power switch but it wouldn’t respond, or would turn on and off.

I found a second switch near to where the charger was connected to the main board, which is pressed down when you close the lid. I pressed this switch down, and then pressed the power button, and the laptop booted, but the screens backlight was off (i guess because it thought the lid was shut), so I could see very faint text, and the laptop starting into windows.

When I let go of the lid switch, the laptop powered off again (I guess this was because the daughterboard or charger got moved out of place). I booted it up again with the lid switch pressed, then let go of the lid switch (not the power button) and the screen came on.

I don’t know how or why this worked. Once it worked, I put the machine back together.

The Problem

Aaaargh! That’s how you feel when you install nVidia Geforce drivers for your brand new card and suddenly your display goes blank!! You can sort it out by logging in from another computer using RealVNC. From the remote computer, you select your flat screen/monitor as the ‘primary display’, and choose a compatible resolution so your display shows up OK.

You can also login to windows vista from another computer using Windows Remote Desktop. This didn’t work for me, because it didn’t let me change the graphics settings from another computer. VNC works slightly differently, so it works well when trying to fix this problem.

So you buy a graphics card, PCI Express, nVidia Geforce 8 Series (8400GS in this case) connect it up using a DVI/VGA cable to an LCD display (mines a Fujitsu-Siemens). You have Windows Vista x64 (I tried Business Edition). You’ve installed all the windows updates.

You come round to installing the graphics driver, so you put the driver CD in (or you get the latest version from the website) and install. It asks you to restart. The system loads, you see the the login screen loading at a nice resolution (so the driver’s working). You login, you see the welcome screen and then… BOOM. ‘No Signal Input’. The green LED turns orange, and your screen turns off. What the hell?

Background

A search on google showed that other people were having similar problems. In fact, the problem seems to be quite old. One suggestion is to use a VGA cable, but this doesn’t work for everyone. One explanation offered by some of the forums is that the nVidia drivers can’t read the EDID data held in the monitor. This EDID stuff tells the card what resolutions, refresh rates, colours etc. the monitor supports, so you don’t accidentally set the wrong options and fry your shiny new screen. If you’re monitor doesn’t have this data, or the card can’t read it, you might be getting the black screen problems.

The plot thickens when you try to check if your monitor supports EDID. You can view your monitor data using ViewSonics EDID tool. If you look at your screens EDID data and everything is fine, why is your screen still not working?

In my situtation, the problem was the driver settings. The card was saying I had a TV connected as the primary display instead of an LCD. Stupid machine. So all you get is a black screen as soon as the driver loads.

Things To Try

I Restarted the computer, pressed F8 after the BIOS screen, and chose safe mode (with networking support, so you can connect to the internet and download drivers.) Connected to the net (via a network cable) and downloaded guru3ds driver sweeper and the latest drivers from my subvendors website, Gigabyte. Ran the driver sweeper, and cleared out the nVidia drivers. Restarted into normal mode, installed the drivers and restarted. 

If you get a black screen after doing this, try a different cable (ie from VGA to DVI or vice versa) then try a different monitor if you can.

If you still get a black screen, reboot into Safe mode, run driver sweeper, reboot into normal mode.

If you still get a black screen…

Fixing the Problem with VNC

1. Start in safe mode so you can use your monitor, and remove the nVidia drivers using the guru3d driver sweeper.
2. Restart into normal mode, then download and install RealVNC. I had an old version of the enterprise edition lying around which I installed. This version didn’t work properly as a service (it kept displaying an error message when you try to login ‘connection closed unexpectedly’) so I unregistered the service (from the start menu, all programs, realvnc, unregister as a service) and ran it in user mode.
3. Right click the green V icon in the system tray and choose options. Configure RealVNC to authenticate using a password, and make one up. 
4. Setup your windows firewall to allow VNC through. If you see a dialog asking if you want to allow this program through the firewall choose yes. If you don’t see the dialog, you can do this from the Control Panel -> network connections & sharing option, click the windows firewall link at the bottom left of the window. Then choose allow a program through the firewall in the left hand menu of the new window, and choose add program, browse to the vnc folder, choose winvnc.exe and set the scope to your local subnet.
5. Set RealVNC to start up in user mode everytime you log in by copying the shortcut for starting the server in user mode from the start menu->all programs->realvnc to the startup folder for all users. To do this, right click on start->all programs->startup folder, from the menu choose open all users, and paste the shortcut into there.
6. Remove all user accounts from the system, except for the administrative account you use to install drivers. See step 8 to understand why.
7. Install the latest nVidia drivers and restart the computer when it asks you.
8. The computer loads up. If you see the login screen, login, and wait for the display to go blank. If the screen is already blank at the login screen, just type in your password and hit enter. This works because you only have one account installed. Vista should be logging you in even though you can’t see anything.
9. Once you’re logged in, VNC should have started up. This means you can connect from another computer. Connect to the VNC server from another machine using the vncviewer software, and login using the password you setup before. 
10. You should now be able to see the desktop. Right click on the desktop and choose nVidia Control Panel. Run through the wizard, select a compatible resolution and click ok. In the nVidia control panel, there is a menu on the left, choose the option ‘manage multiple displays’. On my computer it was detecting the screen as a TV. I chose to display the same image on two displays (clone) and then selected P17 + TV in the drop down list (my monitor was called P17.) I Chose my P17 monitor as the primary display. I then Clicked apply, clicked OK to keep the new settings. And the flat screen started working normally.

Notes:

If you install the latest RealVNC Enterprise/Personal Edition trial, it may be more compatible with Vista. In which case, it will register and run as a service. This means you don’t have to delete all your accounts in step 6 and try to login without seeing anything in step 8. I’ve not tried this though, so someone try this out and see if it works.

Comments welcome!

Why Build Your Own?

You might fancy putting together your next desktop computer instead of buying it off the shelf. Here’s some (useful?) advice to help you along the way.

These days companies such as DELL, or even your local computer shop/person can build you one. In fact, companies like DELL have

• competitive prices
• plug and play, ready to go, they can even install it for you
• you get good support when things go wrong
• you can purchase a guarantee in case you have an accident/theft

Those are the advantages of buying new, what about building yourself? I’m sure you can think of a dozen great reasons, but here are my personal favourites.

1. Something new; you get to open things up and look inside
2. You don’t have to put up with crappy customer services when things go wrong, (you have to fix it yourself)
3. You get loads more manuals and boxes with your new PC!

So there are a number of good reasons to build your own, or buy new. If you’re planning to build, read on.

What You’ll Need

You’ll need to buy the components and put them all together. I like to shop at http://www.microdirect.co.uk, for good prices and great service.

When buying components, you need to do your homework to get a good deal. Find out what the newest technology is out there. Also check out the specs, reviews, customer feedback, buying guides etc for the expensive  items. Make an informed choice so you won’t regret it later.

The essential components you need are:

1. Motherboard: Buy a good motherboard that supports the best CPU, RAM speeds in your budget. Motherboards may have network cards, sound cards, and even graphics cards built in to them. Check to see exactly what you’re getting, you don’t want to go back to buy missing parts.
2. CPU: Buy the best you can afford. You can buy retail boxes with CPU fans in them or buy the CPU fan separately. You need good cooling on your CPU to stop it overheating and getting damaged. Intel or AMD? AMD are cheaper, some say intels run cooler/faster. You’ll need to research the chips you can afford and make a choice.
3. RAM: If a CPU is like a person cooking in the kitchen. The RAM is like the worktop. You need plenty of space to cut and chop and mix and whisk etc. So get plenty of RAM, especially when it’s cheap eg 1GB-4GB. 2GB is recommended for vista apparently
4. Graphics Card: You need one to connect a monitor to the base unit. You can buy a motherboard with a graphics chip built in (it’ll say something like ‘onboard vga’), in which case you don’t have to buy a separate (usually more expensive) card. New cards come out all the time, so get the best card you can afford. If you’re into games and stuff, you might look for an SLI capable motherboard, and buy two cards, which work together for better performance.
5. Hard Disk Drive: This is your permanent storage. Depending on what you plan to do on your PC, you can easily fill around 60GB to 250GB of HDD space. Buy as big as you can. 40GB minimum.
6. Optical Disc Drive: You’ll need a DVD reader because you might come across data/video discs you want to use. Try a DVD-RW drive so you can write discs as well, so you can make data backups etc.
7. Floppy Disk Drive: You might be able to get along without one. You can still use a floppy to flash your motherboard’s BIOS, or your graphics cards BIOS. You may also need to load extra drivers when installing windows, in which case you can use a floppy driver disk too. If you don’t have an internal drive, you can buy an external one later. Just enable legacy USB support in your BIOS to boot it.
8. Case: A good case to put it all in. You can buy cases with power supplies already in them, or you can buy the two separate. You’d generally go for a 450W or above power supply. You should also look out for front panel USB/speaker connectors on your case, so you’re not reaching round the back to plug things in all the time.
9. Cooling: You’ll need a fan on your CPU, a fan attached to your case to draw air into the case, optionally, a fan to blow more air directly onto the CPU, and an optional fan to extract air out through the front of the case.

You can also put in wireless networking cards, memory card readers, TV cards etc. depending on your needs/budget etc.

Putting It Together

Get an antistatic wrist strap. You can get away withouth one, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. You should touch a grounded surface before you start, to discharge any static electricity.

I like to insert the CPU & RAM into the motherboard before attaching the board to the case. Just be careful of the board when you attach it, because it can be chunky, and heavy.

You’ll need open your case, and find the screws that come with it. Sometimes the pack of screws gets stuck in some corner, so look for it properly. You have to attach the motherboard to the case. The motherboard musn’t be in contact with the case though, as the case is grounded, so if it touches, it’ll short out the board and probably screw your system up. Your motherboard manual should show you how to attach the motherboard, if it doesn’t google for a guide.

Attach your graphics card next, unless it’s onboard. Once the graphics card is connected, connect the cables coming out of the front of the case for your Motherboard Power, PC speaker, Hard Disk Drive Usage Light, Power Switch and Reset Switch to the motherboard. There should be some help in your motherboard manual telling you where to connect what. The cables should be labelled positive, ground etc. so make sure they’re in connected right way around.

Booting Up

Connect a PS2 keyboard up. Sometimes the USB ones don’t work with the BIOS the first time. You can go into your BIOS settings by pressing F2/delete keys on your PS2 keyboard and enabling an option usually called ‘legacy usb support’.

Connect a mouse, monitor and a power supply. See if it starts up, and you get your BIOS screen (usually a logo, and black screens with your PC specs). If not, wait a couple of seconds, sometimes things might take a couple of seconds to show on screen. If you’re still not seeing anything on the monitor, continue to troubleshooting.

If on the other hand you’re system boots, attach a Hard Disk Drive, Floppy and Optical Drives and boot the system again. If it starts again, you can proceed to install windows.

Next install the drivers for your motherboard chipset, graphics card etc. from the CDs you get with the boards.

If all goes well, install the latest windows updates to your system such as the service packs, .NET frameworks etc.

If all is still going well, visit your motherboard/graphics card/etc. manufacturers’ websites and download the latest updates. I don’t recommend flashing the BIOS unless you’re having problems. I wouldn’t even update the drivers unless theres a good reason for it, eg security update, performance increase etc. This is because, sometimes you have to think about the saying ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. In other words, new drivers can bring new problems. Especially the driver updates suggested by windows update.

You’re all setup with windows now so you can go ahead and install your own software.

Troubleshooting

Assuming you’ve hooked up the graphics card, and your system isn’t booting:

The first thing to ask is this: are all the cables connected properly?

Is the power switched on, and connected? Is the monitor  switched on & connected?

Is the power cable coming out of the PSU connected to the motherboard? Sometimes there is a separate 12v connectors which you may have missed.

Is the power switch cable connected properly? Sometimes it’s hard to get it onto the pins, or it might not be the right way round.

Do you have all the right components? Is your RAM/CPU the right compatible with the motherboard?

Are you getting error lights/beeps/codes? Check these in your manual.

Is the RAM seated properly?

At this point, you could take out the graphics card and test it in a separate system. If it’s working fine, re-insert it into the motherboard. If you can’t test it elsewhere, try reseating it anyway.

Reseat the CPU. Take it out and put it back in. Carefully.

Reseat the CPU Fan. If the fan is loose, you’re system might start, then cut out. You can usually check the CPU/motherboard temperature in the bios (to see if the CPU fan is working/connected). Some fans need to be attached quite firmly so you might need to get it on tighter.

You’re system should be booting by now. If it isn’t try searching for your problem online. Usually other people will have already asked the same question on a forum somewhere. You just have to search for the right words, and read loadsa silly posts, totally unrelated to what you want, until you hit gold.

Problems Installing Windows

Sometimes your computer boots but you get other wierd problems. For example, your computer boots, but your display doesn’t turn on if you restart the computer. Or windows won’t install properly, eg setup begins but you get unexpected read errors (like hard drive read/write errors) which make the setup fail.

Most of the time this is to do with your CPU clock speed. You need to go into your BIOS (F2 or delete on startup) and set your CPU clock speed manually to a lower setting. Be careful when making these kind of changes, check your manual to make sure you’re settings are compatible.

Sometimes you get windows installed, but then it starts crashing etc. This may be solved by updating your hardware drivers. If this doesn’t help, try updating the BIOS. If you screw up when updating the bios (eg you hit the standbye button on you’re keyboard) you’re system can stop booting. If you follow the instructions carefully, you should be fine.