What happens on your computer while you are away? Check your virus protection capacity today. Watch this video to see the gremlins in your computer.

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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. 

This is probably the most common call I receive for a computer repair service call.  While in some cases it requires the hands of a computer technician most cases do not.  When you notice that your computer is beginning to run slower there are a few procedures that you can perform and possibly save you a house call or a trip to the repair shop.  First,  make sure that your hard drive has been recently been defragged.  I know it takes a long time for the defrag process but if I come to your house you are paying me by the hour to watch your computer defrag as that is the first check that I will make.  Second, verify that you have ample free space available on your hard drive.  I recommend that the maximum usage of a hard drive should be less than 70%.  If you have less than 30% of the drive free then you have a choice of deleting some older programs that you don’t use or upgrading your hard drive.  I will post soon about upgrading a hard drive.  The third step I perform is cleaning out the Prefetch folder.  This folder holds all the bits and pieces of programs that you have used on your computer.  More on My Computer is Running Slow