Computer Repair Guide

Symptoms: Computer boots like normal, Windows loading screen will appear, after a few seconds, a quick blue screen will appear and then your computer restarts. You can't even read the BSOD information because it just flash in less than a second. This will go on and on and you will be stuck in a loop. Computer will not boot even in safe mode or any other option. Solution: First thing to do is to disable the option that computer automatically restarts when a fatal error/system failure occurs. There is an option inside windows for that, but in this case we can't do that. So what you need to do is to press F8 before the Windows XP logo appears right after the BIOS screen (just like what you do when you want to boot in safe mode). This screen will appear: (this image is from Vista but it's basically the same) What you need to do is choose the option: "Disable automatic restart on system failure" (the one in the red box). After doing that, your computer will restart, an...

Somebody brought an Acer Aspire 4710 laptop here in my shop. The owner wants me to reformat it because she is planning to sell it. It's easy if you have the recovery cd/dvd, the problem is, she doesn't have one, because it never came with one when she bought it. FYI, majority of laptop manufacturer today do not include recovery disk, instead they put it in a hidden partition in your hard disk drive. So I turned the laptop on, backed up any important files, restart the computer and fired up the recovery software by pressing alt+F10 (i believe this is the universal key sequence to enter recovery mode for acer laptops). Then another problem occur. The eRecovery file has a password (Empowering Technology Password). A note under the setup of the password reads: If you lose the Empowering Technology password, there is no way to reset it except by reformatting your system. Make sure to remember or write down your password! According to some website, the default password is 000000 (t...

Somebody brought in a laptop today, it was an HP Pavilion N3310. The owner asked me to do a reformat. The OS is Windows 98 and he wanted it to stay that way. After formatting the said laptop, it occurred to me that there was no driver for the video card, sound card and modem. So I look up on the internet but it was hard to look for the exact specification of this laptop. Fortunately, I saw someone at driverguide.com uploaded the driver for the built in vga. There's also available sound and modem driver. But the problem is, after downloading, the modem is still looking for the driver. Also, the first vga driver that i downloaded was only meant for Windows XP. So i download another one, and it works. After a little research I found the correct driver for the modem and soundcard at the ESS website. I notice that the file that was uploaded in driverguide is for Win95 and Win98 first edition, so that is the reason why it didn't work. Here's the download links for those of you wh...