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Hi again! I bring some PC Repair tips.

Precipice

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Howdy. I've spent the last 3 months working my ass off for peanuts, not having any time to visit you guys, no time for my home, my girlfriend or her son, or even myself. But I quit and I'll be dropping by semi-regularly once I've secured regular, gainful employment.

Having given up the trade, I've compiled a comprehensive list of information that would be useful to anyone interested in computer repair. What's here will save a significant amount of time on Google. Of course, if you're not interested in any of that, skip to the bottom and say hi. :)

A big problem is viruses. They come in all varieties. Some are annoying at best, others are devastating to no end. Sometimes you're not protected, sometimes the protection you have is insufficient. It happens, and when it's really bad, you can't even use or install any antivirus packages. They made some tools for that. Mostly free and mostly portable.

adwCleaner
ComboFix
Junkware Removal Tool
McAfee Stinger
Norton Power Eraser
rkill
RogueKiller
Tdsskiller
UnHackMe

Sometimes you have legit antivirus packages that are lousy. These are the ones that are notorious for not getting along with each other, so using one entails removing the others if they're installed. Yet uninstalling them isn't always so straightforward. But the publishers of those AV packages made tools for that too.

AVG Remover
MCPR
Norton Removal Tool

Let's say you can't get to a point where you can use any of these tools. Burn some CDs and you're back in the game.
Password? Lazesoft. Doesn't work on machines linked to a Microsoft account though.

Viruses got you down? Kaspersky Rescue Disk may help.

And these let you do all sorts of cool stuff. Memory tests, hard drive regeneration, a MiniXP environment for troubleshooting various things. Powerful DOS tools. Tons of stuff in these CDs.
Hiren's Boot CD
FalconFour Boot CD
Ultimate Boot CD
Although on newer machines you may need to fiddle with the BIOS settings, boot options, flip it over to legacy support before these will work.

Let's say you suspect a hard drive of being near its death. There's some really good tools for finding out. Windows' own chkdsk isn't too bad if you use it right, but there's also all the tools provided by Western Digital for diagnostics and EaseUS for backing up and cloning drives. WD stuff is free. EaseUS has some free versions of some of their software which still works pretty darn well. Another good one to look at is Macrium Reflect. Again, the free's pretty good. The pro stuff is way cooler though. If you need data recovery, EaseUS has something for that too. But if you're gonna go cheap, go cheap all the way and use Recuva. It isn't good, but there's a free portable version out.

Thinking about replacing or upgrading memory? Start with CrucialScan. It'll help you determine what memory you should consider.

Where do you back this stuff up though? Buy some DVDs and make some image copies with ImgBurn. It's probably the best tool I've used for creating images from discs, burning them to discs, just all your disc reading and writing needs.

Before you go reformatting though, make sure you grab license keys for all that stuff you have installed. The best I've used for this is RecoverKeys. Unlike the other free products though, this one sucks. There are better free alternatives. ProduKey grabs Windows info, but that's less of an issue with 8 and 10.

Then there's updates. Man I hate updates. Get it all done at once. WSUS. Download all the updates for your system, create and burn an image (or copy to USB or external HDD), run the program and go to sleep. Wake up to a fully updated computer.

Make it easier than that though. Combine reinstalling Windows and updating into one job by slipstreaming updates (and might as well do drivers and software too) into the Windows image. Win7 users can look that up here.

Time to optimize.
Everyone knows about CCleaner. Did you know about JetClean? Despite Chrome saying it's dangerous (it's not), it does a lot of the same stuff as CCleaner but in a different way. It's beneficial to use both. And don't forget to use the built-in Windows drive cleanup utility. Don't mock it, it has its uses.

Uninstall that garbage-ware with Revo Uninstaller. It helps identify and remove registry entries, folders and files after an uninstall. Particularly stubborn files can be removed with FileAssassin.

Defrag. It's best to be rid of all unneeded, unwanted files, including the system files used as page memory, or hibernation and the like. These are typically unmovable by most defragmentation tools and so will prevent them from being as effective as possible, since the idea is to move everything into the outer most part of the drive where the speed is fastest. Now, tools. Auslogics makes a great defrag tool. It can be configured to delete temporary files that everything else misses, too.

Various other tools that come in handy.
Piriform's Speccy. Good system analyzing tool.
HiJackThis and ProcessHacker are good for troubleshooting.
Rufus, for making bootable USB drives. I don't recommend doing that but sometimes you'll have to use a USB instead of a DVD.
GWX Control Panel. Gets rid of the Windows 10 notification on older systems, because it gets annoying. Can also delete the Windows Update cache, disable OS upgrades (it toggles, so not permanent unless you want it to be). It's nifty.
Ultimate Windows Tweaker for Win7, Win8/Win8.1, and Win10. Can help tweak and modify a number of things, both practical and trivial.
Some people on Win8+ miss the old start menu. Classic Shell is a configurable classic start menu. I prefer a modernized XP style, personally.
TeamViewer takes some of the hassle out of helping out a person online or over the phone with a computer problem.
Get back wasted space by deleting duplicate files using dupeGuru. These guys also have music and picture variants.
RED (remove empty directories) deletes empty folders. Good for organizing.
bitRipper is pretty good at ripping video DVDs or DVD images into AVIs.
xnconvert is really good at batch converting, filtering, resizing, whatever to image files. If you need to do a lot of the same thing to a lot of different images, this is what you need.
Notepad2, an excellent replacement to the lackluster notepad. It's a technical editor, without the formatting bothers of wordpad and the like.
By the same author, I like to use ntouch, which can batch change created/modified/accessed dates on any number of folders and files.

Download, install and update free software suites with Ninite. A bonus to this is that the installs are silent, and it automatically disregards any promotional offers like toolbars and such.
A much more technical, cumbersome but far more effective variant is Ketarin. It'll do all the downloading, but you have to tell it what to download (kinda tricky) and installing, or build your own silent installer with the appropriately-named Silent Install Builder.

There's a guy who compiled a very comprehensive list of some very effective and useful tools. He used Ketarin and SyMenu Suite (itself a huge collection of portable tools) to create what he calls the GEGEEK Tech Toolkit. It isn't free, but I promise that the time he spends working on it is worth a contribution.

Last note, portables are good, but they belong on portable media. If it's for your computer, use an installer. When looking for portable programs, go to the people who make the software. Sometimes they'll make portable releases available (Piriform is good about this).

Add your own tips if you've got any, or just say hi. I missed you guys. :)
 

Dark Drakan

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Good to see you again, wondered where you had vanished to.
 

sorenmvp

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How to unlock a pc if forgetting the login password?
 

Gankas

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