File system repair

Windows XP Screen Freezing

October 13, 2008 By Terry Stockdale

Reader Steve Sturgill wrote to ask about screen freeze problems he was having:

Mr. Stockdale, My OS is XP, my ISP is MSN and I connect through broadband. My problem is, any time I right click, as in attempting to access dropdown menus, my screen freezes. Also I am unable to click on any of the tools in the top, left corner of my screen – i.e. File, Edit, View, etc. This has been going on for several weeks! I have looked extensively for a solution online – to no avail. Several sites suggest using a program called ShellExView, which I downloaded and tried, several times, in vain. Nothing seems to work. Can you please advise me? Any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks very much, in advance, Steve

I wrote back to Steve to suggest some actions to try to resolve his problems.

I’ve seen some strange effects like that before – not those exactly (except the apparent freezing on right-clicking for a context menu).

Continue reading Windows XP Screen Freezing

Filed Under: Backups, Bug Fixes, File system repair, Hard Drive Recovery, Hard Drives, Other, System, Terry's Computer Tips, Windows XP

HOWTO: Identifying and Changing Default File Type / Program Associations

May 12, 2008 By Terry Stockdale

If you need to identify which program opens a particular file type, you can do that, and a lot more, using the Folder Options functions in Windows Explorer.

To find Folder Options, open Windows Explorer (right-click on Start, select Explore). Then, on its menu bar, select Tools and then Folder Options…

At this point, we need to select the File Types tab.

On the File Types tab, we see a large, scrollable box that lists file types. As we scroll down the list, we see various file extensions (such as JPG and DOC) along with a text description of the file type.

Continue reading HOWTO: Identifying and Changing Default File Type / Program Associations

Filed Under: File system repair, Performance Tweaks, Software, System, Terry's Computer Tips, Usability, Vista, Windows XP

Second Hard Drive failure with Windows XP Pro SP2

March 14, 2007 By Terry Stockdale

I hope it’s just coincidence, but I have just suffered my second hard drive failure with Window XP SP2 — in two months. Fortunately, I can avoid the cost of a hard drive recovery service, since I back up my data nightly across my network to my Linux box.

Both failures were internal hard drives. Both hard drives were installed in their respective computers.

The drives have been running XP Pro for at least 2.5 years, and Service Pack 2 since it became available. So, they didn’t fail within 2 months of starting use, but within 2 months of each other.

Filed Under: Backups, File system repair, Hard Drive Recovery, Hard Drives, Operating System, Terry's Computer Tips, Windows XP

Hard Drive Replacement Time

February 20, 2007 By Terry Stockdale

In one of my Terry’s Computer Tips newsletters, I answered subscriber Peter Lieurance’s questions about reinstalling Windows XP.

The following week, I finally did the hard drive replacement that I had been planning. Ultimately, I returned unopened Seagate 200GB drive that I had just purchased and got a Seagate 250GB drive for the same price from the same vendor. Now, that’s a deal…

I decided that, even though I could use the Seagate software to copy my Windows installation to my new hard drive, I would rather do a clean install to get rid of any leftover junk.

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Filed Under: File system repair, Hard Drives, Windows XP

Backing Up My Data

October 11, 2006 By Terry Stockdale

Back in the days when I made backups of individual files on floppy diskettes, I had learned what I called Murphy’s Law of Backups. This was: “You will always need one more backup copy than you have.” This taught me the importance of backing up my computer.

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Sometimes that rule applied to backing up a drive onto a bunch of diskettes and running out of diskettes. Other times, it applied to actually using the backup diskette itself, instead of copying the data to the hard drive and then using the file. This was the guaranteed way to make the same dumb mistake with the backup copy ;).

In today’s world, there is one tool on which I rely for backing up individual files, and that’s Karen Kenworthy’s Replicator program. At my house, it backs up the data files that are on my notebook, my desktop, and my wife’s desktop to different machines. Most of these end up on my Linux computer that functions as a file backup site and a web development platform.

It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got your data scattered in folders all over your hard drive, or all stored in My Documents. Either way, if you haven’t backed up your data, you’re rolling the dice.

As a friend says, “there are two types of hard drives — those that have failed and those that haven’t failed yet.”