PC troubleshooting secrets distilled down to an essential oil
The original version belongs to Luis Villazon; I’ve been a fan for over 20 years.
Troubleshooting is a curious skill. It’s part detective work, methodical experimentation, partly inspired guesswork, and part Zen Buddhism.
That’s a lot of parts, but you need them all to be able to sift through a list of symptoms, identify the fault, work out an appropriate remedy and not go barking mad in the process.
Knowing how computers work is also handy, but it isn’t enough by itself, and it’s much less important than you may think now that all human knowledge is just a Google search away. Knowing the answers is all very well, but the real art is asking the right questions. So to see what I mean about Zen?
So I’m not going to give you a fish. I’m not even going to teach you how to fish. I’m going to build you a stinking trawler. Theoretically, this ought to put me out of a job, but in practice, the well of human stupidity seems to replenish itself far faster than I can pump it out, so there’s no need to worry on my behalf.
Before we begin, let us consider the tools of the trade, which are: 1. Another computer 2. A screwdriver 3. A credit card. That’s it.
The screwdriver I use has a nice flowery handle and a reversible socket barrel with two double-ended bits so I can swap between Phillips and flathead in two sizes each. Still, just the smaller of the two Phillips heads would do 90 percent of the time.
The other computer should be working and connected to the internet. Ideally, it should be a desktop PC of roughly the same vintage as the one you wish to fix, but even a laptop is better than nothing.
Among the many things you will not need to include:
- a set of watchmaker’s screwdrivers,
- needle-nose pliers,
- a soldering iron,
- a can of compressed air,
- and an anti-static wrist strap.
I have owned and recommended all of these things in the past, but I’ve never used them except to impress people when I go around their houses to fix something.
You’ll still see computer magazines listing this ’essential troubleshooting toolkit,’ but it’s just there to fill up a page. You are now equipped to attack the five types of computer problems that we shall deal with.
IT USED TO WORK, AND NOW IT DOESN’T (“YOOT-WANID”)
This may sound like it could cover every computer problem, but it’s pretty specific. IUTWANID (pronounced yoot-wannid) means that your computer was working perfectly satisfactorily in the recent past. Something changed prevents the PC from working at all or completely disables a significant component.
At its most extreme, this covers virtually every PC that won’t boot. At one time, they did boot, and now they don’t – that’s IUTWANID. Less extreme examples include the sound suddenly disappearing from games or the inability to connect to the wireless network anymore.
To fix IUTWANID, you need to identify the thing that has changed. If you’ve installed software, try uninstalling it. Unplug any new hardware; use System Restore to roll back the registry. Don’t overreact and reformat – that’s effectively rolling back too far. You’ll need to undo changes in strictly reverse chronological order.
Sometimes – often even – it will seem that nothing has changed recently on your system. This is a common delusion and must be resisted (or beaten out of you). Remember, it used to work. The temptation, of course, is to assume that some bit in your computer has just broken spontaneously and for no reason. But, of course, this does happen, but it’s very, very, very rare.
Computer troubleshooting is so frustrating for most people because they leap too quickly to a ‘something must be broken’ diagnosis and spend ages swapping stuff around inside their system to no effect. So make sure you have undone every change to your PC first – every software install, every driver update, every patch, and every new cable.
If all of that draws a complete and utter blank, you can start cannibalizing your other PC for components to begin ruling out broken stuff. But the snag is that almost everything you swap will require its drivers, and installing these is a change to the system. This is another reason for using this as a last resort.
THE ERROR MESSAGE (“I-GAME”)
Whenever something doesn’t work on your system, and instead, you get a window that pops up and tries to blame you, we call this an error message. The standard operating procedure in this situation is to type the error message into Google (on the spare PC, if necessary) and see what results come up.
The good thing about error messages is that you can guarantee that at least one other person has already figured out the solution. The bad thing is that lots of the answers are idiotic. For example, mouth breathers frequent Yahoo Answers and Ask.com, and you should ignore whatever they advise.
Forums attached to game sites aren’t generally much better. So what you want is a hardware or software manufacturer’s forum, a severe computer site like Ars Technica or Tom’s Hardware, or Wikipedia (or, if you’re truly desperate, you could always try asking the knowledgeable folk at the TechRadar forums).
If you can’t find anything from a top-drawer resource like that, try refining your search. You’ll need to try a different part of the error message as your search string, leaving out those hexadecimal numbers or putting the numbers back in. If that doesn’t work, try putting different parts of the message in quotes.
You’ll find a decent hit in the first three pages of Google results if you get it right. You’re doing it wrong if it takes more than that to get any solid results. Instead, read two or three different forum threads on the topic, and do whatever they say to fix the problem for them.
The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) is the limiting case for error messages, and if you find yourself facing one, your best resource will most likely be Microsoft.
The first stop should be to take the specific error code for a spin on the Knowledge Base and follow the instructions. Because a BSOD is a pretty catastrophic event, you can treat this as a kind of IUTWANID instead, if you like.
This isn’t usually very productive, though, because it ignores the specific information in the error code. Still, if the Knowledge Base page is far too vague to be of any help at all, and you know you’ve changed something recently, this might be the quicker route.
IT’S MORE RUBBISH THAN IT USED TO BE (“IM-ROOTY-OOTY-BEE”)
“Rubbish,” in this context, nearly always means slower, but this category can also be applied to worsening sound quality, sticking keyboards, or increasingly noisy fans. It’s different from IUTWANID because it refers to progressive, chronic deterioration.
If you had 80fps yesterday and only a mere 20 today, that’s IUTWANID, but if you used to be able to play games at acceptable frame rates and nowadays it seems much jerkier, then we call it IMRTIUTB. The key word in that last sentence is “seems.”
Often slowdown is more about your increasing expectations than decreasing performance. When your PC is new, you’re excited and predisposed to think well of it, so the thrashing sound of the hard disk feels like the revving of a powerful engine. That same PC two years later is old and grubby, and subconsciously, you would love to have an excuse to replace it; now, the hard disk seems to wheeze asthmatically. Same noise, a different spin.
There are two standard responses to IMRTIUTB; upgrade or reformat and reinstall. Both are wrong. Money spent on upgrades delays the purchase of your next PC and offers much less benefit per pound than a new system. Upgrading is like balancing a wobbly table; each new component you add creates a bottleneck or an incompatibility somewhere else. What starts as just an extra 1GB of RAM quickly escalates into a new motherboard, CPU, graphics card, and PSU.
Reformatting and reinstalling seem like they will get you back to the halcyon city of a new PC. However, you have to remember that all the patches, updates, and new drivers were downloaded since they will still need to be reinstalled, and they were responsible for much of the original slowdown.
Instead, IMRTIUTB is best addressed by uninstalling things. Any game, demo, shareware utility, or Internet Explorer toolbar add-on that you do not depend on for your life needs to be removed. If you have more than eight icons in your System Tray, eliminate half of them.
All software thinks it’s so vital that it must constantly run in the background. This is incorrect. Whatever it’s doing can wait. Possibly for eternity. Any other kind of IMRTIUTB is probably dirt. So take the lid off, blow away the dust, run your keyboard through the dishwasher and stop eating pizza while you play Crysis.
RANDOMLY, A THING HAPPENS (“WRATH”)
We live in a deterministic universe. The movement of stars, the radioactive decay of atoms, and everything in between are controlled by immutable physical laws. We don’t know what all of them are yet.
If your PC crashes, halts fail, or hinders you every time something happens; then it’s either IUTWANID or IGAEM. If it only sometimes happens, what you have is RATH. From a broad enough perspective, random faults are just deterministic ones whose cause you haven’t yet identified yet. But some causes are better at appearing spontaneous than other causes.
Overheating is a classic example of this. Your computer mainly works when you turn it on, but somewhere between a few minutes and an hour after that, it reboots or locks up, the graphics go very peculiar, or the sound goes screwy. Overheating is relatively easy to diagnose – rebooting immediately doesn’t help, but shutting down and leaving it for a while does.
However, other ‘random’ influences are harder to isolate: radio frequency interference from nearby electrical equipment; heavy network traffic; dry solder joints on circuit boards, broken wires in cables; power surges in the domestic supply.
Be methodical; write down a hypothesis, devise a test, record the result and repeat the experiment to confirm your conclusion. Or, take it as a sign that it’s time for your next PC.
I CAN’T DO THE NEW THING (“ICY-DONUT”)
We all want to do the ‘New Thing.’ The New Thing is exciting and wonderful. All the magazines are talking about New Things. Every website has banner ads reminding you that the New Thing will help you meet girls, earn more money and prevent cancer.
The New Thing is good because it’s new. But the New Thing doesn’t work on your old PC. It doesn’t fit in the slot, has the wrong number of pins, requires too much RAM, and gives you unacceptable frame rates. The New Thing also doesn’t work on your new PC. It’s buggy still, requires constant driver updates, doesn’t let you run in high resolution, and causes all your USB ports to stop responding.
Faced with this, most of you will either blame the old PC or the New Thing. A few may even blame everything on the new PC. But the blame lies with you. It’s your fault for wanting the New Thing. It’s your fault for thinking you could install it and skip merrily along. It’s entirely your fault for believing the New Thing would be reliable and trouble-free.
This is not the way of the New Thing. Wherever possible, PCs should only have new software or hardware added in the first year of their lives. Doing this gives you a reasonable chance that your hardware configuration was considered when the developers were developing. After that year, you can continue to use your PC; of course, don’t add anything new to it.
Suppose the computer isn’t connected to the internet. In that case, you could, theoretically, stay in this holding pattern forever. Still, a networked PC will need to download Windows updates at the very least, and your orbit will gradually decay. This, coupled with the fact that you will inevitably occasionally ignore this rule, which will lead to IMRTIUTB over time, and when your PC is between 18 months and three years old, you will buy a new one.
If you absolutely must, this is the time to invest in the New Thing. Stipulate to the supplier in writing that you are buying the PC for this purpose, making compatibility a condition of sale. If possible, get the supplier to install the New Thing for you. Then it’s his fault (and, therefore, the problem) if you get ICDNT.
The best approach is not to do the New Thing at all. Wait a while; six months or a year. This will turn the New Thing into the Established Thing. The Established Thing is cheaper and has rough edges knocked off it. And the forums are already full of helpful advice should you run into IGAEM.
Ten things that generally don’t help fix your PC
Scanning for viruses because it’s never a virus.
Buying computer books. They are big, heavy, expensive, and out of date. They are also much too general to fix any actual problems. The internet is your friend and faster and more relevant.
Defragmenting the hard disk. Disk fragmentation is much less of a deal than it used to be and was never much of an agreement, to begin with. Any benefit you see is entirely down to the placebo effect.
Posting questions on random forums. Although forums provide valuable advice, it’s rarely worth posting your question. If it’s a common enough problem, someone will have done it already; if it isn’t, no one will know the answer. But this won’t stop them from speculating fruitlessly.
Ringing tech support. There’s nothing they can diagnose that you can’t work out for yourself in half the time on the net. All the excellent tech support people get poached away from the front lines quickly, anyway.
Reinstalling Windows. This replaces your previous problem with another – the more immediate task of getting a stable operating system installation up and running again. And when you eventually complete that particular task, your old problem will probably return.
Switching to Linux, Frying Pan -> Fire - (As a Linux Nut - Unless you’ve been using Linux for a while )
Registry cleaning utilities. Another placebo remedy. It’s like worrying about how tidy the shoe cupboard is. Nobody sees it, so who cares?
Partitioning your hard disk. You can do nothing with separate partitions that you cannot achieve more efficiently and with fewer side effects using folders.
Arbitrary lists because the last item is always made up.
How to fix your neighbor’s PC without sustaining unacceptable casualties
Fixing a neighbor’s PC is not like setting your own. It’s more like the plot of Blackhawk Down. You go full of enthusiasm and good intention, expecting to be back in under 30 minutes. And a day and a half later, you’re still there, ordering replacement motherboards by overnight courier, flashing the BIOS, and reinstalling Windows 95 from floppy disks while RPGs and AK47 rounds slam into the side of the building.
It’s a brutal, dispiriting business that pleases no one, least of all your neighbor, who thought you were supposed to be the expert. To avoid this horrific scenario, you must not fall into the trap of using your time to try and save your neighbor money. Wherever possible, opt for the fastest, most straightforward solution, regardless of cost. Here are some examples:
Neighbour: I upgraded the RAM yesterday, and now my PC doesn’t seem to boot. You: You should get a new PC.
Neighbour: I get this strange message on the screen when I start Windows; You: you should get a new PC.
Neighbour: Crysis seems to slow down whenever the children surf the internet upstairs. You: You should get a new PC.
Neighbour: Can you help me install Vista SP2? You: You should get a new PC.
Neighbour: How do I change the desktop wallpaper? You: Get a new PC.
Neighbour: How do I… You: NEW PC!
And relax…
So there you have it. PC troubleshooting is distilled into an essential oil you can dab alluringly behind each ear.
With the secrets I have revealed here, you can solve any computer problem. If I catch any of you writing the back pages of any major computer magazines, there will be trouble, but otherwise, this gift is yours to do with as you wish.
But there is one secret I haven’t revealed yet; nobody knows what they are doing regarding computers. They are all much too complicated to figure out correctly; once you stumble on the thing that makes that particular problem go away, who will go back obsessively and double-check that removing the fix does make the problem come back?
If you manage to keep your PC running tolerably well until it’s time to buy a new one, you’re a winner. After a few years of doing this with different machines, you may develop a feel for the lie of the land. But none of this amounts to actual expertise.
And if that’s true for you, then you should remember that it’s doubly true for that guy at work who is constantly upgrading his PC and hanging out in the tech forums. PC troubleshooters are charlatans of the worst sort… Except for me, of course. I am an actual PC genius.