A business has 3 computer/registers at their checkout. When any of the registers printed an invoice the middle computer would shutdown. Now whether a computer shuts down or shuts down and restarts is important. The former is always a hardware issue and the later can be a hardware of software issue.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Computer shutting down
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Wet laptops
Laptops get all kinds of things spilt on them and they come in regularly. I recommend the following to give the laptop of fighting chance to survive a dunking or a spill. First is disconnect power and get the machine stopped as soon as possible. Don't worry about saving anything, hold down the power button until the laptop turns off. The next thing to do is to flip the laptop over, remove the battery and sit the computer upside down but open. The laptop will look like an A. This lets the fluid drain away from the motherboard.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Computer Not Booting (An easy one for a change)
A customers computer would not boot. It came up with an error NTLDR not found press Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot. The harddrive wasn't making a noise which was good for a change and could be seen in BIOS. I set up BIOS to boot from a BART partition on my thumb drive. Most BIOS have two boot places. One to pick the device type order and another for the Hard Disk device order. When I restarted the computer would not boot from my thumb drive.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Computer reboots every hour at the same time
Most times technicians fix a problem but do not really know the cause. A customers computer was shutting down. The first thing to ask is if it reboots itself or does it just shutdown completely. In this case the computer (A Vista machine) restarts. If a computer shuts down completely then it is a hardware issue. If a computer restarts then it is probably a blue screen (BSOD) that flashes by too quickly to see.
Lights on but computer would not boot
Ahh Saturday. This computer's lights came on but it would not boot. We can't test motherboards directly but we can test them by a process of elimination. First I remove all peripherals - Memory, data cables to the drives, graphics cards and any other cards. Then I attach a new power supply (PSU) to the two power connectors on the motherboard. 80% of the time I'll get the computer to boot. This case however the motherboard was dead and the customer decided she would rather buy a new computer.