Using Windows Tools for Troubleshooting

well as you know I'm Eli the computer guy today's class is on using Windows tools for troubleshooting so so if you're a computer you know it's not working as fast as you would like if it's crashing if you're giving something called a blue screen of death if for whatever reason your computer your your Windows PC is not working the way you want it to windows has a lot of built-in tools to help you try to figure out what's going on and then be try to fix a lot of problems so many times problems with your PC can be fixed simply by understanding how to use these tools you don't have to go out and spend $50 or $100 on any other type of software you just need to use it what's already built in to the computer this class will show you how to use these tools we'll talk about things like safe mode and system restore task manager hard drive space startup services computer management and a couple of other things so just just give me one second we'll get into this class all these little tools are really simple to use and if you if you understand how to use them and what they're used for you can fix it just a tremendous amount of problems with your PC so the first two tools that I want to talk about are kind of like the the weight weight I didn't want to do that tools these are called one is called safe mode and the other one is called System Restore so let's talk about System Restore first now let's imagine that you install a piece of software onto your computer and then it just it just does something stupid to your computer your computer does not work properly anymore or you get a virus on your computer you know you let your nephew come and use your computer for a night and and all of a sudden there are viruses or they're just problems with it well you can use this a tool called System Restore to go back to a different point in time for your computer so basically what you do is you go into System Restore and then you say I want to go back to how my computer was three days ago or four days ago or five days ago or a month ago or two months ago basically as your your computer is doing the stuff that it does it creates something called system restore points and these system restore points have configuration information about the computer as it was whenever that restore point was created so many times you can just you can just get a do-over you can you say you know something happen to your computer you go in you system restore and it will restore the computer to how it was whenever the restore point was created so like I said well there was two days ago whether it was two months ago you can go back to that period of time now this does not destroy your documents you know your pictures your documents your videos any of that it does not affect what it does effect is if you installed software so if you install office on your computer if you installed antivirus software if you do a system restore that will be gone so you know good or bad on that one the next tool that we should talk about is something called safe mode so what happens is with safe mode is let's say you install stuff on to your computer you install a new network card or you install a new piece of software and then again for some reason it does work properly the computer gives you blue screens of death or it just freezes up well what you can do is you can go into safe mode and what safe mode is is basically it's a stripped-down version of the operating system so your antivirus software does not load all of your startup programs do not load you get the basic basic hardware drivers for your computer you don't get everything the idea with this is let's say you install like I say that that piece of software that piece of hardware when the computer boots up it just crashes your computer well what you can do is you can boot into safe mode it won't boot up you know the antivirus software the anti-malware software or the hard drive drivers and you can go in and you can try to change configurations and see if you can fix the computer in safe mode so those are the first two tools we're going to talk about system restore system restore goes goes back in time to where a restore point was created and safe mode simply allows you to boot into the computer without all the other extraneous stuff starting up when your computer starts up and then once you're in you can go in and try to fix any problems that you can find so to show you how this works we'll go on the computer and I'll just do a really a quick demonstration of how you will use this so I'm going to use this this basic Windows 7 Professional computer to show you how to how to do everything today everything that I show you today this can be done on a Windows 7 computer can be done on a Windows Vista computer Windows XP computer Windows 2000 professional computer most of these tools are available even on the server so 2008 Server 2003 server 2000 server etc so so these tools that I'm showing you really are the core tools that are used to administer and maintain a Windows computers of all types so right now let's show you the system restore and a safe mode so as I said before a system restore basically allows you to go back time so if you installed you know you installed something and it kind of messed up your system you can go back to a previous restore point all you have to do for system restore is you go down to your little start button or a little circle here if you're using Vista or or seven you can just type in restore and a system restore will show up as one of the programs if you're using Windows XP you actually have to go to start programs and accessories and you'll find a system restore there if you are dealing with a 2000 system restore was not part of that so-so system restore works for XP and later so all you do is you see the system restore you click on the link you just hit next and this is showing you restore points so when you can go back to so you see 5:17 at 1:57 5:17 at 1:55 17 at 149 I can show more restore points that's not giving me any more restore points so basically all you would do to to restore would be to select one of these so I could select one of these I click Next and then I click finish and if I click finish what would happen is this would go back it would restore this computer all the software all the programs to how it was at 5:00 on the the 17th at 149 so so this is a really easy way to go back like I say it affects programs but it doesn't affect documents so if you create a document in Word it will still be there word if you just installed it may not be if that makes any sense I don't want to go through all this so I can just click cancel so that is system restore that is how you restore to a previous point in time now what we're going to do is let's say we messed everything up and we want to go into safe mode for this computer all we need to do is go to start and then we're just going to restart the computer now when the computer is booting up after goes past the BIOS screen you need to start pressing f8 continuously to get safe mode so now you see you get these Advanced Boot Options you get safe mode there's safe mode with networking a safe mode with command prompt boot logging they now have a whole whole bunch of different options the main one that you will worry about is safe mode so all you do is you go you go down and you hit safe mode so this is only loading the basic processes and programs that you need for windows to work properly in safe mode you should realize that many times you cannot install pieces of software because the right processes haven't been started for you to install software so this is like going in and you can you know changing a registry edit so so maybe something starting in the registry that you don't want to start so you change registry edit you could delete files you could create files that type of thing so now when it boots up into safe mode well you get this little thing telling you what safe mode is let's close that out the one thing you'll notice is at the four corners it actually says safe mode so it'll tell you you know Microsoft Windows build 7600 safe mode safe mode safe mode so now in here I have a graphical interface I can go in I can try to edit the registry if I need it to etcetera so this is basically just just something so you can go into to the the base of the operating system and try to fix if there's any problems and that's all there is to it so since I've shown you system restore and I've shown you safe mode let's go back out to the real world and we'll talk about task manager now see that's that wasn't too difficult you know safe mode and System Restore that's uh that's that's pretty simple to do so the next tool I want to talk to you about is task manager so so what is task manager task manager allows you to see how much RAM you're using and how much a processor you're using so it shows you you know you only you only have a certain amount of CPU cycles so it shows you how much of that are you using are you using 80% of your CPUs capacity are you using 50 percent are you using a hundred percent you know with your RAM are you using half the amount of RAM that you have or are you using more than the amount of RAM you have if you're using it's called pegging out like with the CPU if you peg out your CPU if you use a hundred percent of your CPU your computer will not function properly basically because all the CPU resources are being taken up and so it the computer can't do all the things that it needs to do if you're using all of your RAM plus some the computer does still work but it will slow down it'll it'll move to a to a crawl so you need to see I mean do you need to upgrade your RAM maybe you have a gig of RAM in your computer and you can go in a task manager and see you're using 1.5 gigs of RAM might be a problem the other thing you can use with task manager which is very nice is there's a pane to show you what applications are open and you can close or force closed applications that are open so let's say outlook has frozen on you you can open up task manager and actually kill the outlook application so it'll close entirely also you can go in and you can see what processes are started on the computer and try to try to shut them down if need be processes are are basically like really small programs like a management outlook outlook is a big program outlook requires a number of processes to work properly so outlook is a big program that's composed of little programs so the little programs are those cesses well you can go in and on the process tab of task manager you can see what processes are currently running how much CPU they're using and how much memory so you might find out that one of these applications is using all of your memory and then you can decide do you really want to upgrade your RAM or do you simply want to stop using this particular application so task manager is just it's it's a go tool tool if I sit down at a computer and somebody's having a problem with the computer the first thing I do is open up task manager because what I want to see is is it using is the computer using all the CPU resources because if it's pegging out at a hundred percent well that's a problem and is it using all of the RAM so you know if like I say if there's only 512 worth of RAM in the computer or one gig of ram and it's using more than that that that may be a very big problem so so with that let's let's let's go on the computer I'll show you how to use task manager again this is something that it just it's just very simple to use and once you see how it works it's you know it's just easy so now we're back at the basic you know Windows 7 screen now with with task manager to know it you should know how much RAM and what kind of processor your computer has before you open up task manager an easy way to find that out is you just go down to the Start button you go to my computer you right-click and then you go to properties when the properties come up and this will show you what kind of processor you have and we'll show you how much RAM you have so on this system I have an Intel i7 processor which is pretty good right now and I have 0.98 gigs of ram it'll also tell me what type of operating system I have so Windows 7 Professional is what is installed so this will give you some base information so that when you open up task manager you you kind of know what you're looking at so now that we know we have a Windows 7 Professional computer we have an intel core i7 processor and we have one gig of ram we can open ask manager so all you do is you go down to the little task bar down here at the bottom you right-click and then you do start task manager so now when when task manager opens up it'll start on applications so this is where I was talking to you before about this shows you what programs are actually running right now so if we go in let's say we start Google Chrome and we look at task manager we will now see Google Chrome like I say let's say Google Chrome crashes for some reason it's not working properly if I need to shut Google Chrome down and you can see it in the back over here if you want to shut it down you can right click and then you can do end task view end task it will kill that application so you do any task and see it's gone so if let's say if Google Chrome had frozen up or if out look at frozen up or word or any piece of software you can go into the application right click and do in a task the next tab is processes so these are all the little individual processes that are working on your computer that make up you know the bigger the bigger programs so you can see DWM explored i DXE all this search protector vb box all these things and you can see how much of both the CPU and the memory they're using so you can sort by CPU and you can see that the different things as they're using CPU or you can sort by memory usage and see the different things that that are using up memory so this cert whatever that is search protocol host is using 1452 kilobytes so if that was using too much let's say that one of these services was using I don't know a gig of memory or just a 100 Meg's of memory and you didn't want that to happen again you can right-click on it and you can go down and you can do end process and that will kill the process entirely also here is where you can see if you have any weird viruses on your computer even viruses can work as processes you can go in and you can look at the different processes and then do a Google search about them so you know if you're worried CSRs SDXC what is that you know you could actually do a google search on that and see if it's good or bad you know it's probably fun but it could be a virus then you go in Windows 7 and Vista that have services this will show this to you later but then we go to performance so this is how we see how your computer is functioning so we look at the CPU usage as you can see right now basically this computer is using zero percent of CPU let's tack it up to 23 and then back down again if I came in and this CPU was at a hundred percent this computer would be having a lot of problems because if the computer is running at a hundred percent it literally means that there's there's no more CPU resources to go around so if you try to open up another program it's it's you know it's just really bad then down below the CPU usage you see memory or a ram so right now it's using five hundred and two Meg's of RAM so since I have a gig of ram on this computer that's fine if this computer only had you know 256 Meg's of RAM and it was trying to use 502 obviously you would need to upgrade the RAM you know or if it was this right here was saying that again it was using let's say 1.3 gigs of ram this computer only has 1 gig of ram that would mean i would need to upgrade the RAM on the computer and that that's really all there is a two task manager so in order to get to task manager you just right click down here on the task bar you do start task manager the applications tab shows you the applications that are currently running you know outlook word etc processes these are the the smaller programs that run them to make an application big so you know you got explored at Exe you can see task manager' all this stuff over here it shows you how much resources are using so CPU memory etc we can go to performance and this is the big one like I say every time I sit down at a computer this is what I look at is the CPU usage if this is up at a hundred percent that means this computer has problems so either either you need to do a major tune-up on the computer or you need to buy a new computer but if the CPU is up at ninety to one hundred percent this computer has problems and then memory again if the number here is bigger than the amount of memory that you have on your system then you just need to upgrade the RAM that's pretty simple so that's all there is the task manager let's let's go back out in the real world see ya nothing must it much to a task manager once you once you understand how to use it again really simple tool not too complicated so the next thing we need to talk about it is making sure your hard drive is ok so so you know if your hard drive isn't working properly of course your computer is not going to work properly so Windows has a built in tools to allow you to see what's going on with your hard drive the first thing that you should remember is however big your hard drive is you should have at least 10% of the the hard drive space free for your computer to work properly so if you have a hundred gig hard drive 10 gigs should be free space if you go less than 10 gigs of free space you could start to have problems so so we see this a lot you know out in the real world for some reason things like log files or temporary files will all of a sudden start clogging up somebody's computer or though they'll plug in an iPod and they'll do like a little synchronization and they don't realize that the iPod has 200 gigs of music and their computer only has an 80 gig hard drive well what happens is all the music goes onto the computer but then the computer doesn't have enough free space on the hard drive to do all the stuff that it needs to do and then things just just slow to a crawl or they crash so so when you're dealing with your hard drive remember you need at least 10 percent free space so if you have an 80 gig hard drive you need 8 gigs of storage free on that hard drive if you have a terabyte hard drive you need 100 gigs free the reason is is just windows needs a lot of little temporary files and it needs to be able to to write stuff and read stuff from the disk and if you don't have 10 percent free well you know it all goes back fortunately Microsoft has a nice little tool built in to allow you to see how much free space is on your hard drive and then to try to clean out all the temporary files that may be on the hard drive that's clogging things up it also does error checking and a couple of other things so so let's go onto the computer and I'll show you the tools that are built in to allow you to deal with your our drive on the Windows operating system so we're back at the Windows 7 screen and I'll show you how how to use the hard drive tools so to use the tools you know for defragmenting the hard drive or cleaning up the hard drive all you do is you go down to a little start little circle and you go to computer or my computer if you're using one of the other operating systems and you will see your hard drives so we just right click on your hard drive and then go to properties again this is this is the same this is this is how it's been I think since Windows 95 so any windows computer you're using will will use this and this now shows you information about your hard drive so it shows you that the entire capacity of the hard drive is nineteen point eight gigs the used space is nine point six four gigs and the free space is ten point two gigs so it shows you the total size how much is used is how much is free now let's say since you know 20 gig hard drive remember I have to have at least two gigs free for this computer to work properly if there were less than two gigs free you can go down to this tool called disk cleanup disk cleanup is going to try to clean out all the temporary files and all the files on your system that you probably don't need like downloaded Program Files temporary Internet files offline web pages the recycle bin like many people don't realize when you throw something away and the computer it goes into the recycle bin that still takes up storage space until you empty the recycle bin you have log files temporary files etc so what you can do here is these little check boxes by whatever item it is you can either check it or uncheck it and then you would do clean up system files if you click on clean up system files then it will go through and it'll totally delete all those files again like I said I've seen that it'd be a big problem with a recycle bin so where I talked about before if you have an iPod and you connect it to your computer and then you know it tries to sync all that data to your computer well you go in and you try to delete all the music you're still having problems with the computer the reason is is because you only move those files to recycle bin you haven't gotten rid of them entirely so if you had that problem you will need to delete all the files and then go into disk cleanup and actually try to you know have it be so so that the recycle bin gets emptied let's click cancel now then the other tools that you have if you go up here to tools you have error checking so this is the old check disk or scan disk this will look to see if there's any problems on the hard drive do you have bad sectors etc and then you have defragment defragment now or there there defragment tool if you click on this it'll go through and it will try to defragment the hard drive so you know fragmentation is where you have data spread all willy-nilly all of your hard drive and that can cause problems that can slow down your computer so if you defragment your hard drive what that does is it tries to pull all the data into clumps on onto your computer so it's easier to read but that's really all there is for the for the hard disk tools again you just right click on the hard disk that you're dealing with you go to properties it'll show you the total capacity the use space the free space if you want to do a disk cleanup you just click on just clean up it goes through the routine and and that's about it so so with that let's let's go back out to the real world and talk about startup services so that's that's all there is to maintaining your hard drive with the Windows operating system the next thing that we should talk about is startup services and startup programs this is the bane of our existence nowadays so what our startup services and startup programs well all the these manufacturers are software like Adobe and QuickBooks and you know everybody else well when you start a piece of software for the first time it takes a little while for that piece of software to load entirely so these companies like Adobe or QuickBooks inside they want their software to load faster so it seems like it's it's opening quicker to to you the user so what they do is when your computer boots up they actually start up the little bit of the application when your computer boots up so you'll you'll notice like it'll be like Adobe helper or quick bookcase helper that that boots up when your computer boots up this is fine and dandy if you don't have too many of these pieces of software starting when your computer boots up what happens now is since all of the software vendors do this you have lots and lots and lots of pieces of software that try to start up when your computer starts up and then all of a sudden you're using all of your RAM and you're using all of your CPU resources for these programs that you're not actually using because let's say like with QuickBooks you may open QuickBooks once a day you may open QuickBooks once a week but but the startup program is there so that it's always using resources from your computer again with Adobe you may use it once a day once a week but but what Adobe does is is they they install this little piece of startup software so that as soon as your computer starts Adobe starts using those resources RAM CPU etc now again you get too many of these and all of a sudden you're using all of your resources for these applications that you're not actually using right now so there's a couple of ways to deal with this there there's a tool that I'm going to show you called MS config Ms config allows you to selectively decide what services and programs will start up when your computer starts up we can go into the registry so I'll show you how to clean out the registry files that the tell Windows to start up certain programs and then there's a start up folder which is really easy it's just you go to start programs and there's something else called the start up folder and basically any link in that startup folder is triggered whenever the computer boots up so they can pewter will boot up it'll look in the startup folder and if something is there then it will will start the program so again this gets a little more complicated a little more complicated so you're gonna have to follow me when we go into the computer but again it is it's pretty simple so I'll show you the MS config the registry and the startup folder so we're back to the the windows a7 home screen so the first tool that I want to show you how to use for for getting rid of these startup services or seeing if they're causing problems is something called MS config so to use MS config all you do is you go down to start and then in either the run box or you know this whatever is now called box you type in M s Co n f IG MS config and just press ENTER and now I you get this MS config utility that gives you a number of options there's a basic start up a selection so you can either do a normal start up this will load all devices device drivers and services you can do a diagnostic start up load basic device devices and services or you can select what you want to start when the computer starts most people will only use this one startup tab if you notice here these are our services that are started when the computer starts up so a VirtualBox you have Microsoft Security Essentials Google update Adobe Acrobat etc if I didn't want one of these services to start when the computer starts I could simply uncheck the box and hit okay and that service will not start up so if you think you're having you know a problem with one of these services that's been installed you can you know unselect it using this tool and then when you restart the computer that that services service won't start when the computer starts up you also have the ability to enable all and disable all there's actual services here so within this tool you could select which services you want to start or not start you know server workstation tcp/ip NetBIOS helper under services be very very very careful you have to understand what you're doing for this to go well if you start unchecking here all willy-nilly this will cause major major problems for you so start up the startup tab you can do anything you want in here it's probably not going to do a lot of damage to you under the services if you if you can start playing with this willy-nilly it could cause a lot of problems for you and that's that's really about all there is to TMS config it just allows you to go in look at some of the things that start up on your computer and then selectively be able to disable them now that you've seen that there are things that start up on the computer because your registry tells them to start up and so if you don't want to selectively disable them if you want to just totally get rid of them altogether then you actually go into the registry and you you edit it so to do that we go down to start again and ATAR and run or this box we do reg or eg edit EDI T and this is the registry editor and Alaska you know URL I want to run it yes yes so now we are in the registry editor I was in this before so when you first come into it what you're going to do is you're going to go to H key local machine and then you're going to go to software then you're going to go to Microsoft scroll down then you're going to go to Windows then you're gonna go to current version and then you're going to go to run so when the machine starts up these are the pieces of software that let's start with it so as we can see Microsoft Security Essentials and VBox tray if I wanted to delete these all I would do is I would select it and I'll click delete if I delete it then these pieces of software will not start up when the computer starts up you should also go up to 8 hkey current user and go to the same place so you go to 80 current user software microsoft windows currentversion run and you'll see here also has a you know it's it's telling the computer to start Google update when the computer starts up so if you didn't want Google update to start you can just right click and you can say delete and then you say yes when you go in to come to computers where people are really complaining about problems really complaining about being them slow and all of that sometimes you'll see 20 or 30 items here so so that's that's why it's a problem you know that this is a pretty new pretty clean computer so there's not a lot in here but it is a computer that's been running for four or five years and you open this up in all seriousness you may see 20 or 30 different programs that are started up when the computer starts up and all you do to get them to stop starting up is you just highlight them and then you just hit delete you do that and then won't start up with a computer anymore the one caution I will say in here is do not delete for virus or anti-malware software because of course you want that software to start when the computer starts up and be very careful about deleting printer anything that has to do with printers HP in particular needs to have these little markers in the registry in order for for the printer to work right so if you see anything in here about HP printers or Lexmark printers or such I would say probably don't delete those if you see QuickBooks if you see Adobe if you see all the other crap that you're going to see in here delete all that just don't delete anything for antivirus or anti-malware software or anything for printers that that can cause you problems and also I know this seems this is a lot to remember so I will put the path to these registry keys down in the notes when we're done so since we've now seen the registry the final thing is the startup folder so all the startup folder is it's a little folder where you go to start all programs and then startup all this is a little folder and anything in the folder gets started when the computer starts up so right now I have in there Adobe Reader 9 so if this computer boots up Adobe Reader 9 will start all you do to stop this from happening is you right-click on the startup folder and you hit open so this opens that startup folder has an actual folder and then you just right-click and you hit delete you say yes and now Adobe will no longer start when the computer starts up so that's really all there is to controlling the startup processes if you want to use MS config its MS conf IG you can go in and selectively decide what you want to start or not start this can be a very useful tool if you want to get rid of these the startup files altogether you can go into the registry in the registry you can you can delete all the keys in there and that will keep things from starting up and then you go to the startup folder under Start program startup folder go in there and delete any links or programs in there you do those things and that is basically all you have to do to clean up your startup routines so with that let's let's go back out to the real world so that's what you do to clean up although those startup routines you go in you just clean those things out and I guarantee you if you do that your computer's going to start running better like like today as soon as you do that your computer will start running better so the next thing we need to talk about is something called computer management so this is a whole suite of tools again that are that are built into Windows to allow you to manage you the system so basically as I'll show you you go in you right-click my computer you select manage and then you're presented with all these tools the first tool that I'll show you is something called Event Viewer this is the log file for your computer system so this you know every time something happens to your computer it gets logged here and so if there are errors or if there are problems you can go into Event Viewer and see the errors or problems this may tell you what's going wrong with your computer why you're having problems the next tool is something called local users and groups this is where you can go in on a business class computer and you can you can change you can create users you can change passwords you can create groups and you can change groups so if you want to change permissions and stuff that would be one of the places you go to to do that or if you log in as an administrator and somebody has forgotten their password you can go in and reset their password from there the next thing is a device manager device manager shows you how the operating system looks at all the hardware on the computer so if you're having a problem getting on the internet you know it may be Comcast or maybe your internet provider and maybe a virus or it may be that the driver for your network card is not installed properly so when you go into device manager you can see if your devices are installed properly and if not you can update your driver the drivers for your hardware from there the last tool that we're going to talk about or the second-last tool is something called disk management this shows you how the computer sees the hard drives that are the on your system so if you go in and this happens a lot you buy a Sony or hewlett-packard computer they tell you you have a 250 gig hard drive but when you go when you look at the hard drive space it's only 120 gigs the reason is is because they created 120 gig partition on a 250 get a gig hard drive so if you want to use that extra 130 gigs of space you have to create a new partition so that you can use it again I'll show you how all that's done and then finally the services section of computer management this shows you all the services that start when that when that when the computer starts up so so things like you know does VPN client startup does remote desktop or Terminal Services start up you can go in there and so if you're having a problem with a computer you know if you're trying to do remote desktop to that computer possibly the Terminal Services service has been disabled so in the services area you can set services to start automatically you can set them to start manually or you can disable them so imagine if you have a computer and you want that computer to be very secure you don't want something like terminal services running so you could go in and you could disable Terminal Services right from the from the services screen so so so those are the tools so it's a computer management well do Event Viewer which is the log files for the system local users and groups these are users and permissions for the system device manager this is Hardware on the computer disk management this is how the hard drives are seen by the computer you know partitioning formatting and such and then services these are the services that start up with your computer or this is where you change how the services start up so you can have them start up automatically manually or disable them all together so so with that let's let's let's go to the computer and I'll show you how these work so we're back to the main screen the home screen on Windows 7 and let's show you this computer management so computer management again is the core or one of the main tools you'll use for managing and administering a Windows computer so all you need to do is you need to go down to start and then right click computer or my computer and then click manage this is basically the same against from Windows 2000 all the way up to now so it used to be like my computer and you right clicked it but now it's just computer you right-click it and then you hit manage once you've done that you will you will then and get this screen and so these are the core administrative tasks for for this computer you will see task scheduler we won't go into that in this class but this is where you can actually schedule tasks to happen in your computer we have Event Viewer so Event Viewer is what I was telling you before these are the logs off for the computer so we can go down to application logs and no there's nothing in there we go to security logs and we can see a audit success so this is people that have actually been logging into this computer we can go down to system and this is information so it shows different things that has been happening on this computer now if you get the white a little eye that's just informational it just tells you you know that it's happening now if you get this red exclamation mark this means there's a problem so if you right click or you can actually just double click you can see what it's saying so it's saying the IP helper service depends on the network store interface or risk switch fail to start but just so you understand there are always it's Windows Microsoft products there are always going to be errors in here and there are always going to be problems so don't worry about these kind of problems if you don't see that you're having a problem so if you think your computer is running fine you kind of ignore these what happens is let's say with this IP helper service let's say your your network your internet service isn't working right or it's not working very well that's where you would go in and you would look at the event properties and see if there are any problems and this is they might say that it's not getting a DHCP address from something it might say that there's a problem when you see these problems you can then go in Google search and see what the solution is so with this like I said there's a lot of different errors here you just double click on the error decom got error 108 4 so if I was having problems with this computer I would then use this to then Google and try to find out what the solution is you know with the the error logs you have application error logs you have security error logs set up logs system logs and whatever forwarded events is but these are the main ones so basically application security and system go if it is white with a little information then then don't really worry about it it just happened if you see a little yellow exclamation mark it means that there might be a problem if thinks that there might be a problem and if you see a red it means that there is definitely a problem just remember with those red definite problem errors is if you don't notice that there's a problem don't worry about it you only worry about those if you you actually notice that there is a problem so the past Event Viewer we then go to local users and groups so this is what controls the user accounts and the groups on this computer so if we go to users we'll see you know administrator guest home group and user and then if we go to groups we see all of the different groups that are on the computer administrators backup operators guests the whole not yours we'll do a whole class on users and groups but this basically just gives you gives you an idea about them at this point so if we need to administer a user all you do is you right-click on the user and then from here you can do a number of things so here I could set the password so if I was an administrator for this computer and this person had forgotten their password I could set it to a new password right here I could delete the user I could rename the user can also go into properties and this gives you a few more options so you know can put in the full name of the person you can say user cannot change password you can a disabled account the big thing in here though is you'll go to member so this shows you what groups this user is a member of so this user is a member of the administrators and the home user so as a member of the administrators group this person is able to install software and do a lot of things on the computer so imagine that this is a this is a computer where you want the people to be able to to install software on you would go in to this person's use your account and then you would make them a member of the administrators group and they will now be able to do things like install software but imagine you're having a real problem with users installing software and you don't want them to be able to install software you could go in here and highlight the administrators group and remove and now this user so this person that we're looking at right now will no longer be able to install software on the computer it's it's really that easy so that's that's all there is to the local users and groups again we'll have a big much bigger class on permissions and all that but but this is a basic thing just remember in order to reset the password you right-click and you do set password and if you need to make them a member of a group you just go into properties you go to member of and then you click Add to make them a member of a group we then go down to Device Manager so device manager shows you the hardware on your computer and what's going up so most of this is fine we see down here that there's a little yellow exclamation mark by the multimedia audio controller so if I was having a problem with you know the speaker's of my computer it might be that I haven't installed the the sound card properly to fix this problem you can just right-click and you can do update driver software so if you click on update driver software you can either tell it to search automatically so it'll go on to the internet and try to search for the software or the DRI the the the driver for the hardware or you can do browse my local computer and manually tell it where the driver is again you have to kind of device drivers are but but if you do that's all you do to fix that problem so if you see that there's a problem with one of your pieces of hardware just right-click and you can do update driver and that will hopefully update the driver for you you can also from here disable and enable uh pieces of hardware so like with some computers they have a real problem where if you leave both network cards operational that you get weird problems getting on the network so a lot of these new new motherboards have two network ports built into them well if they're not actually both connected and you you leave one you just leave one enabled it can cause problems so you can actually go in and for these these different adapters and such you could actually right-click and you could do disable and that would basically turn off the piece of hardware for the computer system so let's say you have a laptop computer and you have it plugged into the local network while you keep getting all these little bubbles telling you about you know wireless network found but you don't want to connect to the wireless network you could right-click on the wireless network card and disable it if you did that then then it stops functioning all together and you would no longer get though those little little bubbles so that's device manager the next tool is disk management we just select this this tells us how the computer sees the hard drives that are sitting on the computer so disc 0 so this is telling you the actual disk and then it tells you how how it's partition so we have a hundred Meg restore partition and then we have the C Drive which is a you know nineteen point nine gigs from here if there was extra space you can right-click you can do you can do things like change the drive letter you could I'm at the partition you could extend the partition and shrink and partition etc again this is probably one way we needed another class on but I just want to show you that this exists so like I say if if you were told that your harddrive should be 250 gigs or 500 gigs but you only have let's say 120 gigs worth of storage that you can see it might be because Disk Management doesn't see the rest of the hard drive all you would have to do is go in here create a new partition format the partition and you would have more space for your hard drive the final tool is services so if we go down to services this shows you all the individual services that are started when the computer starts up so soon so it shows you active X installer application experience branch cache you know all the stuff this defragment or DHCP client etc so if you're having problems in the network you know is the DNS client actually started is the DHCP client actually started you can double click on these individual services it'll tell you about the service and then it also tells you the startup type so you know if you wanted to really play with people you can actually disable the DHCP client service if you did that then this computer would no longer be able to receive IP addresses it shows you things like dependencies these are services that depend on this service to work etc so these are these are services again don't play with them too much but but understand that they are here you know depending on what problems you're having with your computer this may be the problem especially you know if the computer has been used by somebody else for a couple of years they have may have done to something stupid and because of you know them shutting off one of these services that maybe the issue that you're dealing with but that's that's really all there is to computer management like I say you just all you do is you go to star you right-click computer or my computer and then select manage from here you have a vent viewer you have local users in groups you have device manager disk management and services these are very important tools for being able to manage and maintain your system and she get comfortable with them regardless so with that let's go out and have some final thoughts and talk about what that what to do from here so those are the basic built and tools you can use for troubleshooting a Windows computer like I say these are very useful these are very good tools that I always use especially like task manager whenever I sit down at a client's computer I just quickly open task manager just so I have an idea of how the computer is running you know if they they bring you in for a printer problem you can open up task manager and you can see if they're having other issues you know one you know you can hopefully fix some other issues while you're there and two of course you can upsell you know what what you can do for the client you know I know I'm here for the printer but I see your CPU is max you know would you like me to do a tune-up for your computer but again all these tools are very simple to use and and you just just need to use them if you're going to be maintaining Windows computers we talked about Safe Mode so so safe mode is let's say you install it driver on to your computer or if you stole an application and then your computer starts acting wacky you can press f8 while the computer is booting up you go into safe mode and safe mode basically it doesn't it doesn't start up all the applications that normally get started up on a computer boots it doesn't use all the device drivers it's basically it's it's just enough of the operating system to actually boot so that you can go into it and try to fix any problems you know maybe you can go in and just make a few edits or delete something and that will make things better the next thing you can try is something called system restore so system restore tries to put the computer back to how it was a whenever the last restore point was made so you can try to you know if you get a virus or again if your your nephew or your kid doesn't make stupid to the computer you can try to put the computer back to a time before they have played with the computer this only changes the applications settings so if you installed office or if you install antivirus software that will all be gone your documents your videos that type of thing will not be now again with this this is very good for like I say if you install a piece of software if you install something that's not good for your computer viruses be a little careful about sometimes by going back to a previous restore point it fixes the virus problem other times the virus is still there and you'll just get it another day or two I show you how to use task manager again like I say whenever I sit at anybody's computer I always open up task manager you want to make sure that the CPU is nowhere near the hundred percent mark so you know 80 percent or less is best if the compute if the CPU is pegging out if it's sitting there at a hundred percent all the time that computer has problems it's it's just going to be a pain to work with I showed you how to how to look at your RAM so again the computer can kind of use more RAM than it has so if you have a gig of ram it can use 1.5 gigs of ram uses something called a page file to do that remember although this this this works it slows down your computer tremendously so if you if you have a gig of ram and you see that your computer is using 1.5 gigs of ram you need to just best bet is just to upgrade the computer to 2 gigs around so if you're seeing that it's using more ram than it has just just upgrade the computer really the best I also showed you how you can look at the applications that are currently running you know if an application freezes you can go in and you can just kill that application I also showed you the processes so the processes are the little like kind of basically the little pieces of software that make the bigger pieces of software work so let's say Microsoft Outlook may have a few processes that make it work you can go into these individual processes you can see how much CPU they're using how much memory they're using and right then and there you can kill that individual process so sometimes things just hang up and if you go in and you kill some process that's using all of your RAM or CPU that may fix the problem we talked about the hard drive so we go in or remember you need at least 10% of your hard drive free for your computer to work properly so if you have a hundred gig hard drive you should have 10 gigs of free space on that hard drive the computer needs to be able to to write stuff to the harddrive and pull it out you know little temporary files and log files and all that and if you don't have ten percent space it just doesn't work very well so I showed you how to go in you can do a disk cleanup you can defragment the drive check for errors etc you know you don't need to do this a lot but but if you do need to do this it's a very useful tool again as I talked about the bane of our existence are these startup services so these little pieces of software and services that start up when the computer starts up you know Adobe and QuickBooks thinks this is cute but it just it just causes a mess for most of us so I'll show you how to go to ms config and selectively decide what we'll start up when the computer starts up I showed you how to go into the registry and clean out the registry files that start up applications on services and I showed you that start up folder you know at Start programs start up folder anything in that start up folder will be launched when the computer boots up so if you put a link in there when the computer boots up that link will will trigger when the computer boots and then finally I showed you computer management computer management really is the core to most of the tools that you're going to use to administer the computer system you have Event Viewer so Event Viewer is the log file for the computer for the Windows PC if you go in there and you see big red X's it means that the computer is having problems and if you're having problems that this might be the reason for it so you can look at whatever that thing and the log file is and see if you can figure out the problem from that there's local users and groups again this is where you can create users you can reset passwords you can put people into groups so you know if you have a have a user that needs to be able to be able to install software onto the computer you can then put that user into the administrator group and the administrator group has permission to do things like install software on the computer I showed you device manager device manager is a little application that shows you how the operating system sees the hardware on the computer so if you go in and there's there's a big red X by one your pieces of hardware well a problem you know either there may be a physical problem with the hardware or a UV SMA needed driver a lot of times I see people reinstall operating systems and they forget about the device drivers so they don't understand why they can't get on the Internet and the reason is is because they did not install the device driver for their network card also you can go in you know if you're having bigger problems with your computer with a hardware of your computer if you know we have specific hardware on your computer or it's supposed to be there and then you you open up device manager and it's not it's nowhere in that list it may mean you're having physical problems with the computer we talked about Disk Management so disk management again it shows things like partitions whether to create dynamic drives a whole bunch of stuff about the hard drive on the computer so this isn't where you go to clean up a hard drive you use the other application to do that this is where you go in to create partitions the format hard drives etc and then finally we looked at services so again these are little pieces of software that start up when the computer starts up usually pertaining to the operating system itself so things like Terminal Services you know HTTP client that type of stuff services can either start automatically manually or they can be disabled so again if you're coming in behind somebody you know you're coming to a computer it's it's been in use for three or four years and you want to do something like Remote Desktop to it and that is not working it may be because Terminal Services has been disabled so you can go into services and you see what services are you know start up automatically manually or disabled now all these tools that I showed you today have been around since Windows 2000 professionals so these are not you know you don't have to worry that oh I showed you on one operating system and it'll be really different on another operating system basically Windows 7 Windows Vista Windows XP and Windows 2000 are basically the same of course with Microsoft with Windows every time they come out with a new operating system they change it just a little bit but they don't change it very much you know if you go to task manager you just go down to a little task bar right click and do task manager it has always been that way if you want to go to computer man to commit you just right click on my computer you go to manage if you want to do the hard drive you know you right-click on on on your your C Drive and then you go to properties all these things have stayed the same you know for the past ten years so you know don't worry you know I showed you one operating system it will work on all the other operating systems you know with this batch of tools like I said you you really in the real world you can probably fix about 70% of all problems that you have using these tools I mean they really I mean they show you what's going on with the computer now on top of these tools you can use two additional pieces of software they're free but they're not from Microsoft to make your life a little easier there's something called C C or C cleaner C cleaner goes in and it can get rid of all the temporary files on the computer it can go through the registry and clean up the registry a good bit it's a very useful tool again it's very free to make your computer run a little better and there's something called defraggler so I showed you how to defragment your hard drive the built in a piece of software to defragment your hard drive for some reason with Windows that that's not really a great tool to use for defragment the hard drive it just it's quirky it fails a lot it's not always the the best tool to use but this tool called the frag ler will work a better to defragment your hard drive so if you one defragment your hard drive a download defraggler you know down at the resources will have a link to it and that is a better way to defragment your hard drive so so that's it like I say managing just just a little desktop computer it is not that difficult it's not that hard just use these tools that I showed you and again you can fix probably at least 70% your problems I mean seriously so as you know I am Eli the computer guy this is using Windows tools for troubleshooting and I hope to see you at the next class

Channel: Eli the Computer Guy

Views: 502,499

Keywords: windows, tools, 720p

Id: BVBm-mO6cyQ

Length: 64min 16sec (3856 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 16 2011