The people over at comcast have written a free troubleshooting guide for windows xp systems. There is of course no 100% fool proof way to fix a windows xp system, the problems that can occur are manifold and no article can ever deal with every possible error.
Nevertheless the article covers a wide variety of possible solutions, all software based. The nine chapters start with anti virus and anti spyware advice. This makes sure your system is as clean as possible. Virii and Spyware can be the source of many problems with your pc, e.g. slowdowns, missing files, popups etc.
Chapter three and four give advice to use windows update and update the drivers which are good but rather general tips. Everyone should have up to date drivers and use windows update if a new security exploit hits the web. Still, if you have not done it for a while you should give this a try.
Chapter five, six and seven deal with detecting hardware errors. You get diagnostic tools for hard drives, memory and your cpu. Last but not least we got the internet and advanced section. The internet chapter looks rather useless to me but the last chapter advanced has some nice tool recommendations.
[tags]diagnose, diagnosis, windows xp, spyware, virus, trojan, look up, blue screen, reboots, hardware failure, hard disk, memory, cpu, lock-ups[/tags]
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