Your IT Tool Box

Diy-Computer-Repair can help!

You will find more Troubleshooting techniques in the Self Computer Repair Unleashed! Manual.

What you need in your IT Tool Box

IT Tools that help you diagnose problems, troubleshoot, and repair your computer. From bringing a dead system back to life to keeping that computer in tip top condition.

These are some of the things I use when I am working on a computer from a dead system to optimizing the OS to make it faster. Each link will open in a new window so you can stay on this page as you gather your tools for your IT Tool Box.

Do you need a checklist to help with your problem?
Computer Repair Eight Part Checklist
Installing New Hardware Checklist
Creating an Image of the Boot Partition Checklist

Why you need each item:

BartPE can be installed on a cd, USB flash drive, or an external bootable hard drive. This is a Preinstall Environment (PE), this allows you to: Fix a boot problem, extract data files from a failed OS before reloading it, diagnose hardware problems. Replace or remove drivers that has caused a 'Blue Screen'. Run anti virus, anti spyware, and anti Trojan programs to clean a highly infected system. Create or restore a ghost image of a partition.

Or:

ERD Commander is also a PE bootable OS, although no longer supported or sold by Microsoft it is still available for purchase on some web sites. It will allow you to fix boot problems, registry problems, extract data files from a hard drive the os has failed on, and diagnose hardware problems. All the things that BartPE will do. In addition the last version will repair boot/registry/driver files automatically if you direct it to on startup.

Ghost is a program that will make an image of your hard drive volumes. This is very useful as a backup for recovery purposes. Suppose you needed a special program, you go out to the internet and find some programs that are 30 day trial. You install the program but it isn't what you expected. Then when you go to uninstall the program it trashes your OS so bad it won't start. You can reinstall the OS and all your programs to get the system back where it was before installing the trial program or you can just put your backup image back on the hard drive. Thus saving you countless hours and trying to find all those cd keys. You can run this program from DOS, BartPE, ERD, or for a non OS partition from Windows.

Bootable device, a separate bootable device is required now days because DOS will not do you any good if you want to access your data on a Windows Operating System. You need a device that will hold a OS that will access the Windows OS, these PE Operating Systems are to large for a floppy, you will need at least 250 meg of space to install them. So you need to make a bootable CD, USB Flash drive, or bootable external hard drive.

Anti Virus, Spyware, and Trojan programs are needed to keep hackers/crackers/thieves from gaining access to your data. You should have them installed on the computer and also have a version that will run from your bootable device. If you run these programs from a bootable device you stand a better chance of cleaning out all infections than you would if your computer was running normally.

A How to guide is handy if you are not familiar with all the tasks you need to do when repairing a computer from cleaning out infections to upgrading your system.

Here is a tutorial on BartPE and ERD Commander.

Q and A This site contains a lot of information. As with any publication not all information is available due to space, time, or subject constraints. If you have a question that you did not find the answer on this web site  you a can ask your question here and we will endeavor to get you the most up to date answer possible!

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