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boot

How To: Diagnose Your PC with a Clean Boot

Posted 11/06/2008 at 8:00am | by Alex Castle

9

Comments

One of the most frustrating experiences you can have as a PC user is when something just won’t work. Maybe it’s a game that blacks out after the title screen, or an app that refuses to launch when you tell it to, but in any case it doesn’t give you much of a clue what’s going wrong, and it’s enough to make you want to pull your hair out.

One possible cause of these mysterious crashes is interference with one of your computer’s background processes. Unfortunately, a whole host of them start with Windows, so it can be tricky to figure out if they’re causing a problem, and if so, which one.

In this article, we’ll show you how to use a clean boot to identify harmful program interactions. A clean boot is a boot where no unnecessary background processes launch at startup. Some functionality of the computer may be lost while performing a clean boot, but it’s easily reversible and a powerful diagnostic technique.

» Read More

The Cloning Wars

Posted 09/15/2008 at 4:35pm | by The Maximum PC Staff

4

Comments

Ask the Doctor Logo I’m trying to upgrade my boot disc drive, which uses XP as the OS. I’d failed twice and hen turned to Norton Ghost 12 to copy my C drive to my new disc. During the clone, everything seemed to be working until about 70 percent of the way through the procedure. At that point, a message appeared stating that my computer was trying to communicate with Microsoft. After about two minutes another message appeared stating that the attempt to communicate failed. Then the computer crashed.

I had some difficulty rebooting and then found that XP failed to recognize the new disc drive. It took me some time to figure out that this drive had to be reformatted. I’ve upgraded discs before but never encountered difficulties like this. I called Microsoft and they suggested I buy a copy of Vista and rebuild from scratch. I don’t want to do this. Am I missing something?

—Marvin Burke

Begun, the Clone Wars have. Answers after the jump.

» Read More

How To: Make a Bootable CD-ROM

Posted 09/28/2005 at 2:00pm | by Maximum PC

1

Comment

By Logan Decker If Windows doesn’t feel like starting up and your files are being held hostage, booting into a DOS environment with a floppy disk or floppy emulation won’t do you much good because you can’t access NTFS partitions. This floppy-less method gives you access to all your files (provided the problem isn’t with your drive; if it is, you have our sympathies).

» Read More

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boot

How To: Diagnose Your PC with a Clean Boot

The Cloning Wars

How To: Make a Bootable CD-ROM

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