Troubleshooting and Maintaining Your PC All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies

Front Cover
John Wiley & Sons, 2009 M03 9 - 768 pages
Maintaining a PC is important, and troubleshooting a PC can be a challenge. Dan Gookin is great at explaining how to handle common PC problems, and he’s provided a complete, plain-English manual in Troubleshooting & Maintaining Your PC All-in-One For Dummies.

Liberally laced with Dan’s famous humor and clear instructions, Troubleshooting & Maintaining Your PC All-in-One For Dummies is divided into six minibooks covering hardware, software, laptops, Internet, networking, and maintenance. Each one gives you some background on what causes common problems, to help you understand what’s wrong as well as how to fix it. You’ll learn to:

  • Troubleshoot both Windows XP and Vista
  • Solve e-mail and Web woes, makes friends with ActiveX, and protect your system from evil software and viruses
  • Resolve router problems, reset the modem, delve into IP addresses, and find the elusive wireless network
  • Investigate startup issues, battery quirks, and power problems
  • Travel safely and efficiently with your laptop
  • Perform regular maintenance and keep good backups
  • Solve problems with disks and printers
  • Find missing files, successfully restore files if something major goes wrong, and pep up your PC

The bonus DVD walks you through some of the complex steps discussed in the book and demonstrates tasks like removing a hard drive. There’s a great collection of free and demo software, too. Troubleshooting & Maintaining Your PC All-in-One For Dummies is tech support in a book!

Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Introduction
1
Hardware
9
Let There Be PC
11
Birth Pangs
21
Death Throes
39
Mass Storage Issues
57
Pain in the Printer
75
Seeing Trouble
91
A More Usable Laptop
357
Out on the Road
365
Laptop Maintenance
373
Internet
379
Internet Malaise
381
Woes on the Web
405
EMail Postage Due
425
Wicked Software
451

Peripheralitis
117
Deep Inside the Computer Case
137
Software
169
Windows Gone AWOL
171
Programs Processes and Services
201
The Safe Mode Chapter
221
Putting the Pep Back into the PC
229
User Accounts
243
Unexpected Application Situations
259
Reporting for Duty
281
Recovery Options
301
Registry Fixes
325
Laptops
335
Laptop Asleep Laptop Awake Laptop Dead
337
The File Transfer Chapter
475
Networking
499
Network Hardware Help
501
The Soft Side of Networking
525
PeertoPeer Networking
547
Networking Unplugged
571
Maintenance
589
Backup Backup Backup
591
Pampering the Hard Drive
621
On Schedule
663
A Time to Clean
689
About the DVD
699
Index
703
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2009)

Dan Gookin wrote the original For Dummies book, DOS For Dummies, and launched a phenomenon. Among his many author credits are PCs For Dummies, Laptops For Dummies, and Word 2007 For Dummies. His books have more than 11 million copies in print and have been translated into 32 languages.

Bibliographic information