I was sitting in a GRI class last week and was talking with a fellow realtor that was mentioning that she was having problems after she had accidentally installed a toolbar in her Internet Explorer. She had tried to uninstall it and now was having problems with her system. One thing that you have to be careful about is installing toolbars in your browser, there are a lot of nasty ones out there that can do some serious damage. Some of these toolbars are plain old malware that sucker you into installing them and then you have a heck of a time getting rid of them.
This is just one example of a bad program wreaking havoc on your Windows system files. The best thing to do is search for an uninstaller out there, a lot of times Norton or McAfee have these programs on their website that you can download and run. But, sometimes the damage is already done and running these programs gets rid of the malware but may not repair the damaged files.
The best way to fix this problem for sure is to re-install the operating system fresh, but not everyone knows how to do this and it can be time consuming installing all of your programs and files. Microsoft has a command that will scan the system files and check to see if any have been altered and need to be replaced.
The first thing to do is grab your XP disk and have it ready to insert in your drive when prompted; this disk is what you got with your system and sometimes will say ‘Reinstallation CD'. I haven't tried this in Vista, I honestly can't stand that Operating System as it is too flakey for me at the moment, but it probably works in Vista as well.
1. Click on the Start tab.
2. Click on Run
3. Type in the command box sfc /scannow
4. You will soon be prompted to insert your XP CD (the CD will autostart, just Exit the setup window that opens).
5. Click Retry if it doesn't start to scan.
6. When it has completed, run Windows Update and click on the Custom button.
7. Check all of the boxes and click on the Install button.
You should click on the Custom choice once-in-awhile since Auto Update only updates critical updates.
I still have my computer business and run this on many of my client's machines, but it doesn't always fix their problems and I end up re-installing the system. This is a good first step though, re-installing the OS is a last resort for me because you inevitably forget to back something up and then it's gone forever. Another time saver is imaging your hard drive just after you install a fresh copy of the operating system, it can cut the time of re-installation down to about 8 minutes. I image the drive just after installing the operating system, and then again after installing most of my primary programs like Office and other programs that I always install. Norton Ghost is good for doing this as it's pretty easy, but there are many other programs that will work.
I hadn't intended on writing three technology topics in a row, but I've been in GRI classes a lot lately trying to finish them up and I always run into someone with computer issues and it makes me realize that there are a lot of people out there with similar issues. I will be getting back to writing real estate topics soon, I promise.
Comments(0)