Free PC Troubleshooter From Microsoft
Microsoft has just come out with a free computer troubleshooter at their FixIt Center. It’s still in beta mode but I gave it a whirl. The video below is a quick demo of the PC troubleshooter…
[flashvideo file=https://www.homeofficesmallbusiness.com/wp-content/videos/fixit.flv /]It works on the following Operating Systems:
- Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3)
- Windows XP Pro (64-bit) Service Pack 2 (SP2)
- Windows Vista, Windows 7
- Windows Server 2003 SP2
- Windows Server 2008
- Windows Server 2008 R2
The tool is fairly limited right now but we’ll see if they expand it in the future.
Two other resources I’ve found for solving computer problems are:
The Windows Secrets Lounge. This is a forum dealing with Windows covering the last 10 years. They’ve just modernized it so it can be spidered by the search engines but there’s still unindexed stuff you can find by searching the forum directly.
Another option if your system is all screwed up and you don’t want to have to reformat and reinstall Windows is called Reimage.
You download and run it on your Windows computer and it ‘refurbishes’ your operating system without having to reinstall all of your data and software.
It used to just work on XP computers but now works on Vista and Windows 7 as well. We’ve used it on several client’s computers and it works like a charm, especially after a virus infection.
It’s less than $50 for one key (good indefinitely on that one computer) or less than $70 for three keys. You can also create a boot CD with Reimage on it for computers that won’t load Windows at all.