I see an awful lot of questions involving errors and problems people get
with their computers. I happen to enjoy helping people fix these
problems (no wonder I've been doing tech support for so long) but there
are some ways to make the job easier for you and fix the problem a lot
faster than posting a question here and then waiting to see if anybody
has an answer.
1) Google Is Your Friend
Sit in the closest approximation to the lotus position you can achieve
and chant the following:
Google is my friend
Google is my friend
Google is my friend
If you don't like Google, substitute your favorite search engine name.
For just about any error message you get you can put it into Google and
find exactly what you're looking for. The ease of doing this makes it
so I put in very little effort for a number of problems that people ask
me about. Try it sometime and you may be surprised at how quickly you
can get an answer to your problem. Google even reports messages from
forums and Microsoft knowledgebase articles. Helps an awful lot.
2) Startup Folder
Computers are complex machines and the software is even more complex.
The interactions between hardware and software can get pretty hairy
sometimes and it can be intimidating to try to understand what's going
on. Frankly, when XP came out it became quite a bit harder to
troubleshoot because none of the old standbys were available, such as
editing the AUTOEXEC.BAT and other simple stuff. You can't create a
simplified boot disk to make it so you can run your favorite game so
there are other strategies to use. However, there are still some simple
things you can do to try to diagnose things.
One of the best things to do is to reboot the machine and when the
machine displays the Welcome screen in XP (or the login screen if you
use it) (not sure about Vista) hold down the Shift key until the system
has completed rebooting. This will temporarily disable running anything
in the Startup folder. If there are any conflicts caused by anything in
the Startup folder this will eliminate it. If this is the case, run
each program that's in the Startup folder, try to duplicate your
original error between each startup program you run and see if you can
duplicate the error.
The only real problem with this is that it might be a combination of two
or more programs that are in your Startup folder which cause the
problem. If it gets too complicated, go ahead and ask for help.
3) MSCONFIG
There's a nifty utility included with Windows called MSCONFIG. It
allows you to see almost everything that's started when you boot your
computer. All you have to do is go to the Start menu, select Run and
type in MSCONFIG and hit Enter.
For the purposes of simplicity stick to the Startup tab. Not only will
you see the items in your Startup folder in there, but you'll see
programs that are put into a couple of special registry keys that start
things up behind the scenes. These entries can be cryptic, but there
are some ways to help figure out what's going on.
You'll see three columns: Startup Item, Command and Location.
Sometimes it's pretty easy to tell what you're looking at just by the
name in the Startup column. For example, Yahoo! Messenger's item shows
"YahooMessenger". Pretty simple, huh? But what if you don't understand
what you're seeing? For example, if you see "Smax4", can you remove
this without causing problems? This is where the Command column comes
in. On my system "Smax4" has a command line of:
"C:\Program Files\Analog Devices\SoundMAX\Smax4.exe" /tray
This must have something to do with my sound card because it's loading
from the SoundMAX folder.
But then there are some cryptic names, such as "NvMcTray". What is
this, some kind of McDonald's item? Would you like fries with that?
The command line is no help:
RUNDLL32.EXE C:\WINDOWS\system32\NvMcTray.dll,NvTaskbarInit
So what to do? Remember step one? Google Is Your Friend. (Don't leave
your homepage without it!) This stuff is pretty well documented on the
web. Googling for NvMcTray comes up with the information in the first
link: It's the nVidia Media Center Library.
If you don't understand what you see and a search on Google still leaves
you confused, don't muck with it without asking for help.
4) Ask
Don't be afraid to ask here what to do. You can help by telling us what
you found out in steps 1 through 3, but if you're confused by doing
those things or are just lazy, ask anyway.
If you don't understand
what you see or what to do with the information you've gathered, unless
you like experimenting and are willing to accept the fallout of a
botched fix, then don't hesitate to ask those of us who continually
screw things up just to find out if something will work better.
Somebody might suggest booting into Safe Mode. For the most part, I
don't consider booting into Safe Mode to be an acceptable diagnosis tool
because it removes too many things that are necessary to running many
games. But it can be helpful if you're running into problems that
aren't game related.
Hope that helps and makes things easier for you!
--
The reason Chuck Norris is short is because God was afraid if he was too
tall Chuck Norris could catch him.
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