It was an old computer, an AMD Duron 800 Mhz with a 40 Gigabyte hard drive, 256 Megabytes of RAM running Windows XP. The first thing I did was to lookup the Stop error message that was showing when the bluescreen appeared only to find out that it was most likely a hardware related problem.

My guess was that it was either the motherboard, the RAM or the hard drive that were leading to the bluescreen so I had to test them to find the cause for it. Oh, before I started I made sure that every piece of hardware that was not needed to run the computer was disconnected, like sound and network adapters but also secondary drives and onboard components.

The only way to do this was to burn a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD which contains tools to analyze the hardware and boot it. The disc contains all kinds of utilities to scan, analyze and repair hardware connected to a computer and it is especially effective when it comes to RAM and hard drives.

I decided to run Memtest to test the RAM of the computer which turned out to be fine. The next tool was the Drive Fitness Test designed for IBM and Hitachi hard drives. It turned out that the hard drive had damaged sectors which the tool was able to repair.

With the errors corrected I tried to boot into Windows again and it happened to load just fine. If that would not have helped I would have tried some additional tools to test the CPU for instance. I would have used the cloning tool to clone the hard drive and format it completely to start the installation a new.

The Ultimate Boot CD is an excellent utility if you want to test major PC components without having to install software on the computer.

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I never did send in my computer for repair yet but I would be very cautious about it because of the privacy issue. The computer technician will check the hardware and software installed on your computer which means that he will use software that can read from your computer.

I’m not sure about you but I have stuff on that computer that I do not want a computer technician to see. Here are a few guidelines that could help you protect your privacy and data when bringing in the computer for repairs.

• Check if it is necessary to bring in the whole computer or if bringing in part of it is sufficient. If the DVD drive can’t read disks it would be enough to bring in that drive and not the whole computer.
• If you can still boot you should backup all important files first, most computer technicians know their job but bad things can happen there as well.
• I would move all important files to a external hard drive so that no one at the computer store would be able to access them.This works well if you use a program like Eraser afterwards to clean the free space of the drives so that it is not likely that they can recover the deleted files.
• If you do not have an external drive create an encrypted container on one of your hard drives with True Crypt and move your important files in there. Again it is unlikely that they can break the protection of that container.
• If all things fail you could tell the store owner that you want to stay during the check which would make sure that the technician would not snoop around.

Do you know other possibilities ? Let me know about them.

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Divx Repair is a tool that is very simple to use. Just unzip it to your hard drive and run it from the location that you have unzipped it to. Divx Repair does not need to be installed and does not alter your system files or registry. Double-click Divx Repair to start the program. You can add files with the button Add Files (who would have guessed that, hehe).

The button Repair files starts the automatic repair process which tries to fix bad frames automatically. Only the bad frames will be deleted not the keyframes which means that you should be able to play the movie without errors from now on.

A error report at the end of the repair displays the amount of bad intervals that have been found. If a fix was necessary a new version of the movie will be saved in the same directory as the original movie file.

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