Computer Health Update

Well, it's been an interesting week. Friends and relatives have rallied round and offered advice on my ailing pc.

The first question was - what specifications has it got? Obviously with a third-hand computer one has no idea, except 'very puny presumably'. One way to find this out is to pause the display screen whilst booting up and simply write it all down. A little tricky if your computer goes into off mode before getting to that stage of booting up. However, I tried pressing F1 to go into setup, and this seemed to bypass the problem. Great!

More advice was waiting in my emails - a download called Belarc Advisor will find out all that sort of stuff for you. A few minutes later and I had a list of my computer's vital statistics. Hmmmm, even I could see that the absence of any sort of virus protection needed to be sorted urgently. Help was at hand in the form of AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition, SpyBot Search and Destroy, A2 Anti-Malware and finally Sygate Personal Firewall. All free, just make sure you find the free version. Luckily, apart from a posse of tracking cookies, there didn't seem to be anything suspicious in the machine. I have I hope avoided all the viruses, trojans, malware and assorted other beasties.

But what was the actual problem? The suggestion was to run PC Medik, which says it 'repairs and boosts computer settings to fix hardware and software problems affecting it's performance' (their apostrophe). This didn't seem to make any difference. I found out a couple of things by googling 'my computer won't boot up', including removing all but the essential programmes which open up as the computer is starting up. Removing programmes is a little scary, but fortunately I had The Rough Guide to PCs and Windows to guide me. Still no difference, but emboldened by not actually breaking the thing, I ran Scandisc, which looks for problems on the hard disc. (Normally I do this by not switching off properly...) Fortunately it didn't find any. Next step - disc defragmentation. One assumes that the hard disc of a third-hand computer is in need of a little tidying up. This takes several hours of bleeping - except the poor thing got tired in the middle and crashed so thoroughly that I had to switch it off at the mains.

So back to the helpful emails, where the next suggestion was to try System Restore. This all seemed rather advanced computing to me, but really it's very easy. You just tell it to go back to a date before the problems started and restore the systems to what they were then. All the work you've done since that date is completely unaffected. Jolly clever, and it seems to have worked! So far, the computer has booted up normally several times. Whoopeedoo. (If only I could do something similar with my dodgy back - rewind time to the day before I decided I could angle-grind paving slabs like a navvy).

This has all been rather useful and empowering, and many thanks to my uncle Harry Hill and to Moseley Blogger for all the advice! I'm left with one nagging doubt though. AM I TURNING INTO A GEEK?

Normal service will be restored shortly.