hardware failure

Should I Avoid Windows Update? It Burned Me

A bad Windows Update can cripple your computer. Once it happens to you, it’s tempting to swear off updates forever. I’ll explain why that’s the wrong move, and share one habit that makes any update failure, from Windows or anything else, easy to recover from.

My Computer Does Nothing When Turned On; How Do I Fix It? Something to Look at, and Something to Listen To

A computer that does nothing when you turn it on can be very difficult to diagnose. Spinning disks and blinking lights don’t mean as much as you might think.

Jumping to Conclusions

I’ve noticed a couple of patterns in the questions I get, and both boil down to a form of jumping to the wrong conclusions.

What Do I Do About a Blue Screen on Shutdown?

Blue screen on shutdown could be indicative of an issue with either hardware or software. We’ll walk through some steps you can take to deduce the problem.

Can I stop an “idle” computer from hitting the hard disk at all?

I’ll show you how to reduce the last little bit of disk activity happening on your computer, but is that really going to help?

Why Am I Getting “Open Block” Errors from My Photo Program?

This feels like a hard-drive failure to me. There are several things you can check, but the most urgent thing to do is back up!