Yesterday we were trying to make the laptop we just bought a dual-boot laptop using Windows XP and Windows Vista together. For that, we created the required setup CD with required drivers. When we tried to boot from the CD, we could not do it. We checked the boot order in BIOS, it was correctly set, but still, it was not using CD/DVD to boot.

We got the fix through BIOS upgrade, lets see in details how to to a BIOS upgrade.

Fix:

Several laptops have several ways of BIOS upgrade. Some of them may require a boot CD / floppy / USB-drive to upgrade the BIOS version. Some others like HP Pavallion also provide windows based utility which you can download and run, to upgrade the BIOS. Below is a screen-shot for the utility which we used.

This upgrade utility will compare the present BIOS version with the newly available BIOS version and will install the new BIOS version, and will restart your computer. After booting up, the new BIOS version will come into effect and will fix any bugs which were there in the previous BIOS version.

After making the BIOS upgrade on our laptop, we were able to boot it from the bootable CD / DVD drive. See your laptop manufacturer’s web-site for latest version of BIOS and other hardware drivers.

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We recently published a post on checking the details of device drivers installed on your computer, this will help you when you want to upgrade your device drivers, but the trouble arise when:

What if you have no device driver installed for a particular device?

For example : If the audio driver is not installed on your computer and audio is not working, in such a case you can not see any installed driver or version through the post published before.

Well, we also have a fix for this problem. The fix is to first know what is the hardware configuration of your computer, then find a driver for that online. Let see the fix in detail.

Fix:

There are many methods to know the hardware configuration.First way is to get hold of the box or manual which you got with your computer/motherboard.

But if you don’t have that with you, like many of us, there is a easy to use free software utility, called PC Wizard that will tell you all the hardware configuration details of your computer and also the devices attached.

Download PC Wizard 2008 and install it. After installing, run this utility, it will show you the detailed hardware configuration as shown in the image below.

The above picture tells that the sound device installed is Realtek AC97. You can see the Device information and driver information also using the tabs as seen in the image.

Similarly you can see which Ethernet device, or USB devices or web-cameras etc are attached. Once you know the detailed configuration, you can now go to the manufactures’s web-site and download the latest device drivers compatible to your device.

This content is just a summary, read the full article at ©2009 TroubleFixers - All about fixing computer troubles. All Rights Reserved.

We have received certain problems from the users reporting that the audio is not working after they have installed / uninstalled certain devices.

For example: one of our readers installed wireless modem and after that the sound of the computer is not working.

Why sound stops working?

Most common reasons for this trouble are:

• Such kind of troubles arise after some device / software is installed which tries to gain control as default sound device.
• Also while un-installation of certain softwares, some shared files are removed. At times some important shared file can be deleted which causes troubles with working of sound drivers.
• While installing certain games, it tries to gain control of sound or video drivers and may accidentally harm these driver softwares.

Lets see the ways to fix such troubles.

Fix:

Step1 : First of all check what is your default audio device setting. For this, open Control Panel > Sounds and audio devices, open Audio tab as shown in picture below.

See that the Device selected is your sound-card or on-board audio device. It should not be blank or some modem device. Set the Default sound playback and sound recording device correctly from the drop down menu. If your device is not there in this list see the step 2.

Step2: If the step 1 is not successful, it means that your sound device driver software has become either corrupt or has been accidentally un-installed. In such case, install the sound driver from the sound-card/mother-board driver CD. You can also download the latest driver if you don’t have the driver CD. After you install the driver, restart your computer, and then check the settings as in step 1 again.

Trouble Fixed!

This content is just a summary, read the full article at ©2009 TroubleFixers - All about fixing computer troubles. All Rights Reserved.

One of our readers, Jamie wrote

“My PC monitor used to have 32-bit color quality at 1024×768 pixels. Then one time, the screen appeared to be bleeding. Large red globs rained down on the screen. After that, the best I could get was 800×600 resolution and 16-bit color.”

This is not unusual to get such type of problem. I also faced such a problem when I installed a new game on my desktop. After I launched the game, the display resolution was degraded and remained like that.

Why display resolution gets affected ?

The most common reason for display resolution reduction / degradation is corruption of display driver files by some application or game. Sometimes drivers may get corrupt due to a corruption of drive area which stores the drivers.

Lets see how to fix it.

Fix:

Fix is rather simple, just un-install the previously installed display driver / graphics card driver and install it again. Make sure that you have latest version of display drivers / graphic drivers available. Also update the DirectX version for better graphics experience.

Also you can see this post relating to graphics problem for reference.

After you have installed the drivers, restart your computer. The trouble is fixed.

This content is just a summary, read the full article at ©2009 TroubleFixers - All about fixing computer troubles. All Rights Reserved.

One of our readers is facing a problem, whenever he hibernates his computer, the computer does not hibernate properly and restarts. Isn’t it annoying? It surely is.

What is difference between hibernate and shutdown?

Shutdown : All the contents of the ram and other resources are cleaned up and computer is powered off. When you turn on your computer, all the operating system files are loaded again to boot the computer.

Hibernate: All the contents of ram are stored in a file on hard disk. When you turn on the computer, the same file is copied back to the ram and your computer will start in the state you hibernated it.

But what to do in case your computer restarts on hibernating or standby ?

Lets see the how to get rid of this problem.

Fix:

There are primarily two main reasons why computer restarts on hibernate, they are:

1. In compatible hardware driver.
2. Too much RAM on computer.

Make sure that you have compatible drivers for the hardware on your computer. This is one of the main reasons which causes improper hibernate and which results in computer restart.

For example, in one case, the user had Windows XP on his system and his keyboard drivers were as per Windows 98. Such petty things may also cause problems. Check that all your hardware has compatible drivers installed.

Also too much RAM causes hibernate problem, reason is simple, more the RAM, more the content to copy onto hard disk while hibernating, so in such case, certain builds of Windows XP crash and restart while hibernating. Windows update or installing latest service packs may or may not help, but its worth a try. So if you have good amount of RAM, like 1GB or more, it is recommended to shutdown the computer rather than hibernate.

Hope the information helps to fix the trouble.

This content is just a summary, read the full article at ©2009 TroubleFixers - All about fixing computer troubles. All Rights Reserved.

We recently received a trouble from one of our readers Adam, that whenever he plays movies or play games on his computer, it starts to flicker. Let us have a look at this trouble and see how this can be fixed.

Some common reasons for this trouble can be:

• Slow performance of hardware.
• Old or incompatible graphics drivers.
• Old or un-supported version of DirectX

Fix:

Lets see some ways to improve the graphics performance.

• If your computer is very old, and has low RAM and no-graphics card, you can go for some RAM upgrade and install a graphics card. But before upgrade make sure that when your upgrade RAM and/or graphics card, it is compatible with your computer’s motherboard.
• If your computer is not very old, and you don’t want to do any hardware upgrade, look for newer version of the graphics drivers on Internet. Generally newer versions are released by the motherboard or graphic card’s manufacturers online. Download the latest available graphics drivers for your motherboard (in case of on-board graphics) or graphics card. Uninstall the previous version and then install the new version.
• One of the most common reasons besides the above two reasons is old version of DirectX, or in some cases the DirectX is not installed on computer. Microsoft DirectX is a collection of interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video for windows. Download the latest version of DirectX from this link. Install it and restart your computer.

These three checks will fix the graphics trouble.

Technorati Tags: graphics flickering,directx problem

This content is just a summary, read the full article at ©2009 TroubleFixers - All about fixing computer troubles. All Rights Reserved.