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Computer Repair Flowcharts

Sept 5 2009 UPDATE TO POST: The author of these flowcharts, Morris Rosenthal, expressed concern about having his copyrighted material shown here. Therefore the links from the thumbnail images below were removed. Please see his Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts site for the full examples of his flowcharts or purchase his Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts book from Amazon.

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Many DC area consultants use flowcharts and work flows in their jobs. If you’re interested in following the diagnostic process of computer repair specialists, take a look at these flowcharts by Morris Rosenthal. They illustrate many of my thought processes when fixing a computer problem.

Boot Failure Troubleshooting

The most comprehensive of these flowcharts is the Boot Failure Troubleshooting Flowchart which encompasses several smaller flowcharts. You can see that it is PC focused, asking you to run scandisk and FDISK on your hard drive. Still, the principles apply to any computer.

Many of these troubleshooting repair processes are illustrated individually in an easier to read and print format:

Power Supply Diagnostics

Power Supplies commonly break, especially if they are hit by a power surge (too much power, such as when hit by lightning), blackout (no power), or brownout (lower voltage power).

A power supply can die over time (booting occasionally) making it trickier to diagnose. Be sure to get a high enough wattage power supply, especially if you have a power hungry graphics card.

CPU, RAM and Motherboard Troubleshooting

RAM problems can be vexing because they might only appear when a particular part of the RAM is accessed. This can manifest itself through strange computer behaviors that are often mistaken for viruses.

Motherboards, known as Logic Boards in the Mac world, hold the RAM and CPU. Without replacement parts, it can be difficult to determine where the problem lies between these three components.

Hard Drive Failure

With spinning disks and moving heads, hard drives will eventually fail. Many of today’s laptop hard drives have accelerometers built-in so that they can protect the hard drive when you are moving the laptop. But the moving parts will eventually break. Studies show annual hard drive failure rates to be 2-13%, depending on usage and particular model used. Over the next 5 years there is expected to be a transition to primarily using solid state drives (SSDs) that can potentially last longer and use less energy.

This flowchart assumes the use of IDE hard drives, which are older than the standard SATA drives in today’s computers.

CD and DVD Troubleshooting

Again, this chart assumes that you are using an IDE connector, not today’s standard of SATA drives.

Other steps in drive diagnosis include:

  1. Listening to the drive. Bad hard drives and CD drives might actually sound bad, with grinding, straining, or clicking noises.
  2. Looking in the Windows Device Manager for driver issues. These may be fixed with new drivers, or might (for older IDE drives) require you to remove or change the setup of other devices.

Video Card Diagnostics

These video card diagnostics assume that you are using a discrete video card, not a motherboard with integrated video which are common in today’s lower cost computers.

Network Troubleshooting

This is another case where it is useful to have other computers available to determine if the problem is related to the network (cables, router, switch) or the computer.

Fixing Computers

These and other flowcharts are in Morris Rosenthal’s book:
Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts Revised Edition: Troubleshooting PC Hardware Problems from Boot Failure to Poor Performance

These flowcharts can give helpful hints to fixing computer problems. Unfortunately, they can’t cover all the latest technologies as they come out.

A couple of things that I do to diagnose and repair computers include:

  1. Testing with replacement parts. If the monitor doesn’t show video, you can hook up another monitor with another video cable to see if it’s the computer or monitor that is malfunctioning. If you suspect a bad power supply, you can try a working one.
  2. Perform a quick Google search. New computers often ship with a driver problem or needed updates that are easily fixed by searching Google or the knowledge database of the computer manufacturer.
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SSL What Why Where

What

SSL stands for secure socket layer.  It is the technique used to encrypt and secure data over the internet.  It is most known for use in web browsers.  When you go to a secure web site (known as http over SSL or https), you will see a little lock icon somewhere which shows you that the site is secure.  Things get complicated when you shop for SSL certificates where you can also get site seals or EV SSL and you’ll find a wide range of prices ranging from $30/year to over $1,000/year.

Terminology

  1. SSL certificate – A basic SSL certificate is all you need for a lock to be displayed in a browser.
  2. Site seal – If you purchase an SSL certificate, it often comes with a site seal which is a little graphic you can display on your site which will tell visitors that your site is secured by that SSL seller.
  3. “Deluxe” or “Premium” SSL – Most SSL sellers offer some more expensive version of SSL which is typically the exact same SSL certificate accompanied with a site seal or more advanced site seal.
  4. Multi-domain SSL – It is possible to purchase one SSL certificate that can work for multiple domains which makes it much easier to manage if you need to secure many domains.  This is typically only worth getting if you have a lot of domains.
  5. Extended Validation (EV) SSL – This is the latest and most expensive SSL which in addition to basic SSL will also cause a green security bar to be shown in the latest web browsers.  The green bar means the SSL purchase was verified as a real business which is supposed to make the visitor feel all warm and fuzzy inside.  Considering it isn’t that hard to make a fake business, I never get that feeling.  Also, less than 1/3 of browsers in use right now can show the green bar and most people don’t even know what it means yet.

Why

Without encryption, everything you send from your computer to a web server is totally readable by anything in between.  Things get even more unsafe if you are at an open wifi spot at a cafe where anyone around you can watch all the unencrypted data you are sending and receiving.  As a result, some actions such as site logins or purchasing online must be encrypted with SSL.

Where

There are several places you can buy SSL certificates.  Many are extremely overpriced for no good reason.  From cheapest to most expensive, I’d recommend the following:

  1. GoDaddy.com – The standard SSL from GoDaddy is $30/year and you can typically get a discount off of that with a promo code.  They also offer EV SSL for $500/year.  Sadly, that is relatively cheap for EV SSL.  One complaint I have about GoDaddy is their site to manage your SSL is ugly and confusing.  Another problem is they are not a top tier SSL provider so you have to install what’s called a certificate chain file in addition to the certificate.  If you can handle the extra work and poor site, they are the cheapest way to go and in the end, the SSL works the same.
  2. Geocerts – This is a site that resells GeoTrust certificates for cheaper than GeoTrust sells directly.  GeoTrust certificates are easier to install than GoDaddy because you don’t have to deal with a certificate chain.  They also make the process quick and easy.  Their basic SSL is $99 and their Premium is $129.  If you want a good site seal that is clickable that brings up a useful dialog box about your SSL, GeoTrust Premium is the way to go.
  3. VeriSign – These guys have been around for a long time and they do a good job but their prices are nuts.  $400 for basic SSL and $1000 for EV SSL.  If money is no object, you can consider them.
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VLC Media Player

VLC Media Player can play any kind of video or audio file you throw at it. Compared to Windows Media Player, it is very lightweight. It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

For people who download videos or those who just want something simpler to play their MP3s, VLC is a popular alternative.

Microsoft is promising a smaller version of Windows Media Player as an option when Windows 7 arrives in late 2009. Until then, VLC easily beats it.

VLC is also a useful alternative to the Quicktime Player on the Mac. There are several formats that VLC supports which the Quicktime Player does not by default.

You can run more than one media player on a computer, so give VLC a try.

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“Dial a Human” to Reach a Person

Are you tired of automated call distribution (ACD) systems that force you to listen to long option trees? They start by saying “please listen to all the options because they have recently changed.” In the past, you could just press “0” repeatedly to reach an operator. Now many companies have stopped that and even created complicated trees so that fewer callers reach a person, thereby saving the company money.

This web site compiles company phone numbers and directions to reach a person:

Dial A Human

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DVD Regions & Formats

An Annandale, VA client is moving to France for a year assignment with his family. He wants to be able to play his kids’ favorite DVDs for them on a French TV when he is there. Will this work?

Not easily, for two reasons:

  1. NTSC/PAL: The video on DVDs from the US & Canada is in the NTSC format which uses 720X480 resolution and displays 30 frames per second. European video is in the PAL format which uses 720X576 resolution and displays 25 frames per second.
  2. DVD Regions: DVDs have region codes so that they only play in DVD players sold in that region. The US is Region 1, while Europe is in Region 2. See the Wikipedia DVD Region information.

Work Arounds

There are a couple of ways to address these limitations:

Get a friendly DVD player

Several DVD players can be set up to be region-free by unlocking them with an unlock code entered with the remote control. This code simply allows the user to change the factory-set configuration flag to another region, or to the special region “0” which can play any region.  See the videohelp.com/dvdhacks site to find codes to make DVD players region free and to find out if a particular player can be set to region free.

Many DVD players can play both NTSC/PAL standards. You will need to check the manufacturer information or search online to determine if a particular DVD player can read and display both formats.

Oppo makes my favorite DVD players which have high quality upscalers (also knowns as scalers or upconverters) to make the video appear closer to high definition. Home theater aficionados typically compare the Oppo upscalers to those used on $1000+ DVD players. Oppos can read and play NTSC and PAL formats, and can be changed to region free.

There are many brands of DVD players including dirt-cheap DVD players which should work. The AVS Forum DVD Section also has a lively discussion of the best DVD players available.

Most of these DVD players are rated for 110-240 volts, meaning that they can be plugged into a US (110 volt) or European (220 volt) outlet, with only an adapter needed for the plug to fit. Otherwise, a larger transformer will be needed to step up or step down the voltage.

Play Video Files created from Handbrake

Most DVD players will also play back individual backed-up or ripped video files, as we described how to make with Handbrake. You can burn these files to a CD or DVD. This will get rid of the DVD region issue because the Handbrake-created files are not region specific. It will also allow you to put more video on a disk because the files are compressed with Handbrake. Cartoons, because they have few colors, can be highly compressed without a noticeable impact on quality. That allows you to burn many cartoons onto one disk.

While it’s not made to work out of the box, the limitations of format and region encoding can be overcome with a little work.