If you have witnessed the “blue screen of death” (BSOD) then you are aware of how scary it can be.  All the pictures and documents on your computer facing extinction.  How horrible a thought.  And you meant to make that back up but just never found the time.  Well there may be hope for that drive yet so don’t format it and reinstall, which is the common way of correcting this problem.  If this tip works it may not work for long so be prepared in advance to make backups of your files that are important.  Better yet buy a new hard drive of equal or larger size and clone your system to the new hard drive.  The program that I use exclusively for this procedure is Casper XP and is sold by Future Systems Solutions.  It is an easy to use program.  Before you can clone your hard drive(Please do not think that I am supporting Piracy) you still need to remove the BSOD.  This is accomplished by starting your computer from the Windows CD for your computer.  Once it arrives at the installation screen select repair using recovery console.  This will open a DOS session for you to perform a few commands to try to repair your system.  the first command is (chkdsk /r )without the ( ) this will locate any bad sectors and attempt to recover any data.  This procedure takes quite a while.  After this is done then type in (chkdsk /p) again without the ( ) this verifies the disk against the volume.  The third step is to type in (fixmbr) without the ( ) this will fix the master boot record on the hard drive.  Now type in the command EXIT and your computer will restart.  If all went according to plan then your computer should boot up normally.  If it did not start up then there are further problems and you should take your hard drive to a professional so that they can save the information that you need.  They have special forensic tools to extract data from bad hard drives.  If it started correctly then hooray!  Now is the time to install the Casper XP.  After installing the software shutdown your computer open the case and disconnect the cables from the cdrom drive and connect them to your new hard drive.  I do this as a short cut from changing jumper settings on the hard drive.  Restart your computer and it should find the new hard drive.  After the computer is fully up and running open Casper XP and select the copy drive function.  Leave all the settings at default and Casper XP will copy all the information from your old hard drive to the new hard drive.  Once the procedure is complete then shut down your computer again and disconnect the new hard drive and replace the cables to the CDROM drive.  Then remove the old hard drive from the computer and replace it with the new hard drive.  Restart your computer and it should start normally. 

If you have a question about computers or you are having an issue with your computer then post the question here and I will answer it for you. 

Ok you have a high-speed internet connection and you want to share it with other computers in your house. First you will have to obtain a router for ease of setup and configuration I recommend Linksys BEFSR41 EtherFast Cable/DSL Router w/4-Port Switch for wired connections and Linksys Wireless-G 802.11g Broadband Wireless Router for wireless connections.

     

The manufacturer provides a fantastic program with the router to set up your network. If you follow the procedures that they outline then you should be up and running multiple computers online in no time. If you have difficulties connecting these then you can call your internet service provider or the Linksys help line or drop me a comment with your problem and I will do my best to walk you through the issue.
For local file and printer sharing then there are a few more steps to take. First you have to turn on file and printer sharing. This is accomplished by right clicking on the local area connection and placing a check mark in front of the file sharing line. Second you will need to set up a workgroup for your home network. To do this right click on the my computer icon and select the properties then select the computer name tab. Click the change button on the page, Make sure that you have a name in the computer name and add a name to the workgroup name other than MSHOME like INMYHOUSE . Click ok to allow your computer to restart. Follow the same procedures on the other computer. Once both computers are restarted then open my computer and right click on the drive or folder that you want to share and select sharing and security. Select a name for your share or leave the default there and click apply. You will need to use this procedure on both computers if you want to have access to both computers from either computer. To share a printer then open the control panel and click on printers right click on the printer that you want to share and then select sharing and security. Select a name for your share or leave the default there and click apply. You should now be able to access the information from either computer by clicking on my network places.