Did your computer crash? Does your computer not start? Do you see the blue screen of death(BSOD)? Well these problems can, unfortunately, be attributed to many different things. The main cause is a virus, though. Here I’ll talk about ways to recover from a computer crash.

Of course, the first thing you need to figure out is if you still have power. I know this seems trivial, but computer parts do stop working. Even on the very expensive computers that you would think would last for years. So, if you have lights, flashing or not, and/or you hear fan noises, then you have power in your computer. Don’t forget to make sure your screen has power too. If you have power and you can see something displayed on your screen then you have a good starting point to troubleshoot a crashed computer.

If your Operating System won’t come up so you can see your normal desktop displayed, then you’ll have to try a couple of things to get that back up. One thing you can try is, shut down your computer and let it sit for a few seconds. Then restart your computer and as soon as you hit the power button and it starts to come alive, press and hold F8. You may get some beeps from holding F8, that’s alright though, you can let go of the button when that happens. Your computer should bring up a list of choices at this point. One of those choices will be “Safe Mode”. Go ahead and select that and see if your computer will boot to Safe Mode. If it does then you’re doing pretty good. All you’ll have to do now is run a virus scan, a malware scan, a registry cleanup and maybe even remove an infectious program from your computer. You can find information on all this on my Virus page or my Disk Clean Up page.

Another issue you might have is the BSOD. If you receive a blue screen with a bunch of technical looking information on it, then you’ve gotten the BSOD. This can potentially be a fatal problem, but there are ways to find out how bad it is. Primarily, this is caused by defective hardware or hardware drivers. If it’s defective hardware, then of course it would have to be replaced. If it’s a defective hardware driver, then an uninstall and reinstall of the driver might fix your problem. Although a virus on your computer could also cause a driver to go bad and reinstalling it would only fix it for a little while if you don’t find and remove the virus.

So to start this troubleshooting task, do like you did above to try to boot your system into Safe Mode. If you’re able to access Safe Mode, then you can look around for viruses and malware again and try to remove them. Then you’ll want to go to the device driver screen and check all your devices to see if they’re working properly. If the devices show to be working properly then there’s a lot more in depth research you can do to troubleshoot hardware issues. For example, if you look at individual hardware properties you can disable hardware acceleration to see if that resolves your problem. You can also look at Task Manager to see if your memory and hard disk are working properly. There are many many different things that can be wrong and can be checked to resolve hardware issues caused by drivers. Too many to list and explain here. If you have a specific problem, please feel free to contact me. I will do my best to help you.

Another way to boot your computer is with the included Operating System CD ROM. If you place this CD ROM in your CD drive and boot to that device you could essentially get to your Desktop or to a selection screen to do a repair of your computer software. You could also get to the selection to run a recovery and reset your computer to a previous known good configuration. These options are also available through the F8 method listed above. If you get to that screen and use these selections, then your computer will restore or repair from a separate partition on your drive. This may be your only option as well if you weren’t provided a CD ROM with your computer, which is the case most of the time. Either way you should be able to at least restore or repair your computer to a workable configuration. And of course it’s wise to update and run your virus software, malware software and registry cleaner to insure there are no more potential problems.

If your computer doesn’t have any power at all, then it’s safe to assume your trouble is either a bad power supply or a bad mother board. Which ever is bad can be replaced and this should restore power to your system and you should be back in business. Although, replacing hardware can be a pricey task if done wrong or taken to a shop since you’ll have to pay labor charges. Either one isn’t really that hard to replace, all you have to do is get inside the case and pull out the old one then replace it with a new matching model. The mother board can be a little more tricky since you have to remember where everything plugs into when you put it back together.

Ok, so hopefully this information is helpful in restoring your system to it’s previous state. If you have any questions or need any help please feel free to contact me.