Source: Tom's Guide | Keywords: troubleshoot, upgrade, fix | Themes: Desktop Computers
- 1. Common-Sense Solutions to Hardware Headaches
- 2. Top Ten Crimes against Your Computer, 1-4
- 3. Top Ten Crimes against Your Computer, 5-10
- 4. Getting Good Technical Support
- 5. Secrets of the Hardware Gurus
- 6. Check the Cables First
- 7. Power Supply
- 8. Hard Disk or Hard Disk Controller Problem?
- 9. Solving Printer Problems
- 10. Monitors
- 11. Liquids and Page Fault Errors
- 12. Slow Display
- 13. Memory
- 14. Bigger Hard Drives
- 15. More on this topic
11. Liquids and Page Fault Errors
Liquid on the Computer
As mentioned previously, your computer and liquids are a dangerous combination, so your best bet is to keep the two of them apart. However, accidents do happen, so consider the following information if a spill does occur on your system.
If a can of soda or a cup of coffee has spilled on your keyboard, you may be out of luck. After all, water and electricity don’t get along well, and soda and coffee are corrosive. However, replacement keyboards sell for as little as $10 for a cheap model to about $125 for a deluxe replacement.
Water or soda on a keyboard may be something that can be cleaned up. First of all, unplug the board. Next, you have a couple of choices:
1. Try to clean off the liquid
2. Throw it away and buy an inexpensive ($10 to $25) new one
If you’ve spilled water, your best bet is to let the keyboard dry off. For other liquids, consider popping the keys off the board, taking care to keep track of springs and plastic parts that underlay each key. After the caps are removed, you can attempt to clean up the spill with a damp cloth; some fixer-uppers wash the board under running water and dry it with a hair dryer. As far as I am concerned, I would rather buy a new board.
If you do spill something onto your computer, shut it down immediately and let it dry off completely. To be very safe, remove or at least disconnect your hard drive; in case your computer is fried, you should be able to install the hard drive in a new PC and recover the data that it held.
A spill into an electrified monitor is almost always a fatal event; if it were my display, I wouldn’t even try to find out if it worked anymore. If the monitor is worth the fee that a service department will charge, bring it to a technician for testing.
Page fault errors
Most computer users are unhappily familiar with the dreaded Page Fault Error, one of the blue screens of death that from time to time crashes Windows 98 and earlier operating systems. (Current versions of Windows, including XP and Vista, have mostly kept Microsoft’s promise to be less likely to crash, and to be able to isolate the death of a particular application so that it does not bring down the entire computer.) A page fault is generated when a virtual address established by an application points to a page that is not in physical memory. When that happens, the Virtual Memory Manager attempts to load the page from the hard disk or other storage medium into memory. If there is not enough free memory to hold the page, or if it can’t be found, an error occurs. You have several solutions to prevent future page fault errors:
1. Add more RAM to the system
2. Work with fewer programs open at the same time
3. Make any available setting within the offending program so that it uses less memory
- Previous page Monitors
- Next page Slow Display
Not bad, but I'll take a few exceptions:
1 - cleaning up and defragmenting your hard disk is Windows specific.
The Microsoft block allocator is brain dead, was made that way, and will remain so for as long as Diskeeper and Norton Systemworks create revenue: a Mac OS X, xBSD or Linux-based system doesn't need defragmentation(*), as it is done by the OS on every disk access. You can get efficient defragmentation by:
- disabling System Restore: it doesn't work very well anyway, is a virus nest, and eats up to 6 Gb on your hard disk.
- setting your swap file to a fixed size.
- disabling file system indexing.
- deleting DrWatson's log.
- running Ccleaner once in a while with most settings enabled: once you have applied hotfixes, you don't need the uninstall files anyway. You'll need to clean up IE7's and WMP's patches yourself though.
- make Pagedefrag run at every boot after 0 second wait: the first time it may take a while to run, but it'll keep the Registry and swap file in one piece.
(*)to be fair, such a system may still fragment if you fill up a partition with huge files when it is already more than 80% full - Windows will fragment any file if you get past 10% partition capacity. Some say it's a way to prevent data corruption, as usually adjacent sectors are more likely to get corrupted, but then if that's the case Windows doesn't fragment ENOUGH.
2 - a resident antivirus is a resource drain.
Using a limited user account, a well configured firewall (in software or hardware, preferably both), and scanning downloaded files before you run them (and not making use of MS Outlook Express, which runs files for you) will keep you safe enough.
Not using IE may help, too: Opera or Firefox can operate as pure user level processes. Firefox 3 will be able to notify antivirus when a file is downloaded (if it interacts well with ClamAV, you can dump Norton and forget about the yearly AV tax).
3 - power surge protection.
A sound advice. However, a beefy PSU that you change every 1-2 years and a good power surge preventer are, in my experience, less costly and more efficient than a pack of batteries you'll need to renew every year. A good PSU in great shape can handle brown-outs, especially if your system doesn't draw too much current, and a surge protector will cover the PSU's most damaging attack. Changing the PSU regularly ensures that its capacitors remain at peak efficiency, and that its voltage regulators work as required. It is also unsound to clean up a PSU (it's dangerous!), so getting a new one is the most efficient way to get a clean one. With Vista, no UPS lasts long enough to allow you to save your files and shut down a system cleanly.
Clutz. I eat and drink around mine everyday and I've never once spilled so much as a drop of milk.
Milk eh?
I'd suggest keeping your files on a NAS drive or USB external drive and formatting your MS OS every year.
Besides running a limited account try Virtual Machines for avoiding those pesky viruses