I have a friend who is quite adept at using her computer – In fact she’s quite a whizz when it comes to operating her machine, and does some fairly amazing feats with regard to online and local applications. As an example, since this article was originally written in March 2010, I was at one time talking to her online and mentioned a song that she said she’d never heard of. – Within 12 seconds she had it playing on You-Tube!

A lot of people are good at operating their computer, my friend especially so; just as a lot of people are good at driving a car, for instance. – Using that example again though, how many car drivers are adept at maintaining their cars? Not a lot to be honest. Many rely solely upon the local garage to keep their vehicles running, and some might even tend to neglect the maintenance of their vehicle to some extent in order to save on costs.

In the same way; how many computer operators are adept at maintaining their computers? Again not a lot. Many may rely upon a friend who’s clued up on computer tech to keep their computer running, some may pay a geek to do it. – And yes, there are some who neglect their computer’s maintenance in order to save on costs. – After all; a computer’s a machine, right? Plug in, switch on, and it works? It’s very rare that I have to have my washing machine serviced; so therefore my computing machine shouldn’t need much servicing either.

‘Not quite right actually, I’m sorry to say: A computer is a lot more complicated than a washing machine, and needs regular care and servicing. – There are many articles regarding caring for and servicing your computer on this blog, so do take a while to check some of them out.

The other night my friend and I were chatting online, and her computer crashed a number of times. This is what happens in a lot of cases to a lot of people’s machines, particularly those running Windows (XP) – and it’s those users that I’m mainly targeting with this article: They just seem to crash suddenly, out of the blue and for no apparent reason, after having worked perfectly, maybe even for years. Why does this happen?

To discover the problem so that we can fix it, we first have to use a process of logical deduction by trial and error:Let’s start by asking the question:

“Why did my computer crash?”

The immediate answer to that is that it could be due to one of two issues: A software error- the easiest and cheapest to fix, or a hardware error.

The most likely of the two is a software error, so we’ll investigate that first: -

The most logical software error to look for first is data corruption on the hard drive, and there’s an easy-ish way check for that and put it right at the same time: There’s a function built into all windows operating systems in use today called “chkdsk”, short for check disk. This function at times auto-activates on startup if the operating system detects disk corruption. However we can make it run anyway, without waiting until the operating system notices the problem: -

Here’s what I advised my friend to do: -

Start up your computer and boot into Windows. Don’t open any programs or use the internet yet. Click Start > Run, and type “cmd”.

In the dos window (Black window with white text.) that appears, type “chkdsk /f” at the command-prompt (>) and press return. (Note the space between “chkdsk” and”/f”: It’s “chkdsk /f”, not “chkdsk/f”)

The computer replies that it can’t do it right now and asks if you’d like to schedule the job for when the machine restarts. Type “y” at the prompt and press return.

Reboot your computer and allow it to check your disk’s file system for errors when it starts up. (This could take a while.)

When the disk check’s finished, Windows will momentarily report any errors it found and fixed and will then boot back into Windows.

In a lot of cases the problem will be solved by this step alone. The problem was being caused by a corrupt file system on the disk, which was causing Windows to read the disk wrongly, causing data errors and a system crash as a result.

This is probably the most common cause of a crash, particularly in Windows XP, but it’s not always the cause. – It’s possible that there could be many other things involved which are causing the issue.

For further guidance, please read my free e-Book "Some Things to Try if Windows XP Crashes During Boot", which will give you a lot more ideas on the matter. To get your free copy, just insert your email address into one of the appropriate form on this and almost every page: You’ll see the form at the top of the sidebar.

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