The importance of home turf
The workplace I was asked to do my magic at was familiar ground for me – a small company (the size of a SoHo) one of my relatives hs been working at for nearly a decade now. Since I was lucky enough to be there on several occasions in the past several years, having successfully done numerous minor and two major repairs on their machines, I was probably the first and most obvious choice they had, though I probably won’t ever know for sure. The task itself sounded relatively simple: the company’s antivirus license had run out two weeks ago, and they kept receiving emails from Avast asking if they wanted to renew it. As a result, the company wanted to find someone with enough time and will to re-register the software, update it, run a full scan of the machines and make sure no viruses remain.

Juggling computers
The company itself is organized as a small ethernet-connected network consisting of seven computers, several network printers and a dedicated server/gateway, so the actual layout is relatively easy to follow without much trouble. All but two of the computers had Avast already installed, so the first task was to enter a new registration code and let the software update itself. After checking with all the employees that the computers weren’t needed for the moment – in fact, it was a slow enough day that nobody needed their computers till the day’s end – I made the first round-trip and updated all the licenses, which the software accepted without trouble. Along with that, I copied and installed three key elements from my usual toolkit CDs – Spybot S&D, SpywareBlaster and AdAware; knowing how often spyware is misdiagnosed as an actual virus or worm, it was better to let dedicated software take care of that. While five computers polled for online program updates, the remaining two had their own sets of trouble. One, a database server, had been using Avast and the same anti-spyware programs before, but without a replacement AV key (on account that it was supposedly never used for browsing, despite having a clear internet connection), so the whole ordeal had to be reinstalled in trial mode – enough to clean the computer before it lost its internet pathway. The other computer, a notebook, had a bundled copy of Norton AV 2006, which also expired, so it had to be removed and the registry cleaned in order to avoid false alarms and cross-AV-program trouble.

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Special Report – A Day at a Tech Job

The technical side
Behind the foot-long program subtitle lies a tool with two distinct roles. One of them is automatism, which is something even an average user will learn to appreciate. If you’ve already had a computer for several years and had to do a reinstall, you already know most of your preferences – for instance, your default language and keyboard layout, local settings, Windows components you can’t go without such as Minesweeper, or even patches such as Service Packs and miscellaneous updates. While it’s generally possible to reinstall and apply patches every time, you need to ask yourself if you really wish to go through it over and over again. If you’ve decided to create an updated installer containing the OS, the most recent service pack and all the patches you downloaded until a certain date, nLite will let you do all that. If you wish a common set of drivers automatically applied during the installation, so be it. If you want to add applications such as antiviruses, browsers, IM clients, archivers or utilities, nLite will allow it so long as there’s a definition file for it that allows integration. In other words, you’ll be able to create a bootable image that, once burned onto a CD and popped into the drive, starts itself and proceeds to reinstall the OS without you having to even lift a finger. If you do this for a particular client, your workload will be reduced from that point onward, yet at the same time you’ll get your work done more efficiently and cleanly.

The other benefit of nLite is minimization. While this ability isn’t self-evident, once you discover how and what to crop, you’ll be able to further customize your installation. The basic idea of this is that some Windows features will neccessarily be useless to you – be it Outlook Express, MSN Messenger, the PCMCIA driver set (which is usually only useful on laptops) – all of those can be removed from the installation procedure, making the final burnable image smaller, faster to install and with a lower disk footprint once installed. Users have been known to minimize their Windows 2000 installers to as little as 60 MB – it would be a very limited machine, but if your aim was sparing every byte of RAM once the machine was started, you could trim your installation to a very lean one.

The legal side
Unfortunately, there’s always the legal side of using nLite, or creating any kind of Windows copy, for that matter. While you should generaly be able to create a backup copy of Windows under whichever country’s law, don’t keep several instances of the same licensed copy – keep at most one copy, whether it’s modified or not. Some of you might wonder about the legality of creating a modified copy of legit software. So far, to the best of our knowledge, nobody has been harrased for having an nLitened copy of Windows – but then again, your mileage may vary depending on local country laws.

The rule stated above goes double for any of your clients. Obviously, it’s a very, very bad idea to give out copies of your own installation because of the license key which belongs to one person and them alone. In other words, you’ll have to be able to tailor the installation for your clients using their own install CDs – which is a neccessity anyway considering they have their own preferences and needed drivers. Either way, don’t get tempted to spread around your copy of the OS – or worse yet, theirs. The clients probably wouldn’t take kindly to it, and neither would the BSA.

Future support and client involvement
Now, one of the more important questions is how to make your clients aware of the tool and what it can do for them. The clients always want the job done properly and in the shortest time possible; you have pretty much the same objective. By introducing nLite to your clients you’ll have the ability to customize their own OS to their own machine, whether it’s because of the weaker machine, or the neccessity to get the computer repaired as soon as possible – it’s a win-win situation.

Now, if you’re worried about Vista not being supported, fret not. One of the best features of this utility is not just the fact it’s being continually upgraded with external installers – if you’ve already got Vista and you want to see to which extent it can be trimmed, head out and download vLite. nLite will probably remain in use for quite a while, but just in case someone needs a Vista reinstall this soon, give it a go.

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nLite – Deployment Tool for the Bootable Unattended Windows Installation

RAID – “Independent” vs. “Inexpensive”
The term “RAID” predates personal computers by more than half a decade. Patented back in 1978 by the IBM laboratories, RAIDs had one objective in mind: provide mainframes with storage systems that would be protected from single-disk failures, so a single drive unit wouldn’t pull years of research and work with it. The original specifications called for certain RAID levels, different implementations and disk combinations, each with specific advantages and disadvantages. Modern-day RAID levels 1 through 5 were defined nearly a decade later in 1987. Although actual RAID levels and implementations differ from their original 1978 (and even 1987) definitions, the numbering system remains in use because of its simplicity in explaining both standalone RAID arrays and their nested variants, which will be explained later. All RAID arrays require at least two drives, with some implementations requiring four, eight or even more – all but a very specialized case.
There’s been a certain amount of discord among computer and information technology theorists and practical users about both the “redundant” and “inexpensive or independent” parts of the acronym. For instance, while RAID 0 (by far the most well-known RAID level) does have an assigned number, it’s outside the standard RAID definition both by numbering (it’s outside the 1-5 range) and it doesn’t implement redundancy – that is, it doesn’t provide a fail-safe mechanism for stored data. On the other hand, independent disks can’t be called an array until they’re linked into one, and in order to get linked they have to share certain parameters with other parts of the same array. At the same time, an array of inexpensive disks is also a very lightly used term, as disk prices were astronomically high when the original concept was proposed. However, none of this should affect the RAID’s actual usage – all differing modes have their uses, as explained below.

Stripes and spans
The “nullth” RAID level is by far the most common level of them all, common enough that most of today’s motherboards natively support creating a RAID 0 array without the need for a specialized controller. Also known as a striped volume, it works by splitting data into logical chunks (usually the size of a disk sector, 512 bytes), and writing to all the drives joined in the array in a round-robin fashion. In a three-disk RAID 0 array, for instance, the first block gets written to the first drive, the second to the second drive, the third to the third drive, the fourth to the first drive and so in circles. By forming a RAID 0 array you get a volume that might have somewhat decreased capacity – you take the capacity of the smallest drive in the array and multiply it by the number of disks, as any area outside that cannot be used to form a stripe. The upside is that since sequential data (that hopefully belongs to the same file) is stored simultaneously on all drives, it’s also read simultaneously. This may not hold true for home users who don’t rely on rapid data access, but can come in useful in server or workstation applications that rely on data swapping a lot. Note that a level zero isn’t a true RAID level, as it doesn’t provide any sort of backup or redundancy – it merely joins all disks together. Since the whole array would literally fall apart if one of the disks were to fail, the mean time between disk failure is actually decreased, since one erroneous disk causes the whole array to stop functioning properly.
Along with RAID 0, another relative of the striping family is the JBOD – commonly known as Just a Bunch Of Disks. As its name says, it joins a group of disks of any kind into a long stripe with a common filesystem. The process is the exact opposite of partitioning – it joins different drives into a single volume. Compared to RAID 0, there are two distinct advantages – one is that you can use wildly different capacities and join them in a stripe without losing any storage space, and the other is that a single drive crash doesn’t affect any unstriped data – a file stored on the third drive won’t be damaged if a portion of it wasn’t saved on the failing second drive, as an example. Like RAID 0, however, it doesn’t provide redundancy. Windows systems can be considered to support JBOD in their own way, as they can natively take several drives and join them in a so-called dynamic volume – however, this is not the same as a controller-based JBOD.

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Computer Technicians 204: RAID Guide

The common ground
Computer experts all around the world would be thrilled if all computers would do all tasks equally well, if all configurations were perfect for all tasks. Unfortunately, a basic home computer would be ill-suited to work as a data center, just as using a gaming configuration for office work would be a pretty big waste of money. The reason is pretty obvious – you definitely don’t need a DX10 card on something that’s going to run Word and Excel, and you can’t really expect a machine with integrated graphics to run a 2007 edition game. In theory, you could, if you can stand seeing a game run at 5 spf (yes, that’s seconds per frame). Despite the differences between task-oriented configurations, there are a couple of common points that should be noted and integrated whenever you’re planning a future computer.
Among the first things that spring to mind is the power supply. As was already covered in TNCT 103, a good powersupply is what determines if the machine will last for the next five years or the next two, and it also determines if the whole computer will survive the first power surge or get completely fried. While you might think a fried machine means more business for you, and therefore more money, don’t get fooled. If the PSU alone dies, all you’ll have to do is swap it with a new one and the machine will act like the power surge never happened. On the other hand, if the whole machine gets a 400 V zap, the company will have to say good-bye to valuable documentation they need for business, and if anyone in the company can think of the power supply, it won’t be long before it can be pinned on your bad assessment and selection. And depending on local laws, mentality, or even customs, it might boil down to a lawsuit, something you definitely want to avoid. The PSU rule goes double for power supplies that come with cases (which are usually only good for scrap metal) and prefabricated configurations.
Prefab configurations bring us to our next section, something which is a common weak point of all prefab computers – RAM. Although decent prebuilt computers do exist, more often than not they go for the common man’s viewpoint – the bigger the Great Number (commonly known as the CPU speed), the better the computer. Checking through the specifications usually reveals a woefully small amount of memory, sometimes as low as 256 MB. Considering most modern machines run Windows XP, going under 512 MB will seriously hamper the computer’s performance, even for low-end machines. Going below that is best avoided for two reasons. The machine will be slow to response and unable to multitask, and with most users not knowing how much a program “weighs” in memory usage it’s a rather common occurence. At the same time, the cost-reduction from buying 256 MB compared to 512 MB is minimal these days – you’re trading off a quarter of the memory’s price for a great deal of CPU and swapfile activity. With the advent of Windows Vista the problem will be even more exacerbated, as a newer OS will ultimately need more memory for comfortable work.
Along with memory, one of the key selling points of any prefab machine is the chassis, an eye-catcher to get the customers’ attention. Naturally, we’re discussing creating a complete machine here from scratch, but three things do appear as very important when deciding on the computer cases for your clients. One, we’ve already covered then discussing power supplies – more often than not, the attached PSU can barely reach 60% of its nominal output before shutting off, and is more likely to pull the whole computer along with itself in case of a power spike. The other issue with computer cases is the size – a home computer can use either a small, medium or desktop case, a gaming machine can use a medium or high-tower case, while the only thing fitting for a server would be a high-tower case, although a medium tower could also work depending on the server’s role. As you can see, there’s a certain level of overlapping between them – we’ll discuss it in detail in specific sections. The third issue is the look – this primarily concerns gaming computers, however, picking a lumbering, towering (no pun intended) black case for the company’s main server adds to the overall network’s image, as well as giving it extra visibility among the beige boxes the rest of the clients will use.

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Computer Technicians 301: Planning computer configurations – the right tool for the right task

The Anatomy of a Disk
Contrary to the most commonly used terminology, the hard drive and hard disk aren’t exactly the same thing. A hard drive is the entire unit, which consists of the metal chassis, the spindle motor, the disk platters (the actual hard disks, usually aluminium or glass substrate plates), the head actuators, the read-and-write heads and the drive electronics. Knowing this distinction is vital because of its accuracy – as you’ll read later on, faults may strike any of those components, or even more of them at the same time.
Today’s hard-drives are much more advanced than their predecessors – while the first hard-drive was approximately the size of a medium printer or fax-machine, it had a capacity of a measly 5 MB – something you could fit onto four floppy disks nowadays. The drive platters in those drives were about the size of a 12″ LP record, data density was smaller – however, the drives were sometimes enclosed in clear plastic, allowing both engineers and users to see how they work. Since you’re not likely to run into any of those, here’s a short explanation. In essence, the magnetic drive heads hover a couple of micrometers above the platters, never actually touching them. The head actuator moves it angularly over the portion of the disk covered by the drive’s arm length. The spindle drive keeps the disc rotating up to its maximum speed, either 5400, 7200 or 10800 revolutions per minute in most common drives, and allows the actuator arm full coverage of the disk surface. Much like the optical drive circuitry, the hard drive’s electronics read and write to the disk, handle the data and transport it over either the PATA or SATA cabling. Finally, the metal chassis seals it in to ensure there is no dust inside – this is vital because dust particles can be fatal to a drive’s overall health.

Broken lines and logical fallacies
So what exactly can go down on a disk? Like the similar “what could possibly go wrong”, that’s a question sometimes best not even uttered. It’s practically an invitation for something to happen to it. First of all, there’s the most common and most annoying case: one of the cables inadvertently slipped out of the drive or motherboard. That in itself can cause the hard drive to get intermittent power or connection with the motherboard. In that case, the less unseated the connector is, the better, as ironic as it seems. With a complete power or data cutoff, the worst that can happen is that the drive won’t show up during either POST, bootup, or inside the OS. If the cable is partially unseated, a lot of different effects can happen – the drive might write data without being able to read it, the drive might pop in and out of functionality, the drive motor could come under a constant spin-rest-spin-rest cycle which is uncontrolled and can damage the drive motor, and so forth. Fixing these is pretty simple, if the problem indeed is the cable – either unseating and reseating the cables or getting new ones can fix the problem. Rounded PATA cables used to be unreliable because of poor manufacturing quality and easily breakable wires, but modern-day rounded cables don’t suffer from it. SATA cables are notorious for being relatively easy to unseat due to the short and shallow contacts, so take special care when mounting or remounting them.
The second category includes physical errors in the drive media (the platters themselves). By far the most common of those is a bad sector – literally, a disk section that became unreadable due to mechanical damage and data stored on it is unreliable at best. These errors can be averted by teaching yourself (and the client) to scan the disk surface with ScanDisk, CHKDSK or fsck once in a while in order to check the filesystem’s integrity, as data may as well become corrupted. Note that the utilities don’t automatically performe surface scans, you usually have to check an option or a switch. At the same time, those utilities can pick up other errors such as inconsistent file-tables which can to drive space being incorrectly reported or files rendered inaccessible. This third category said programs can cover contains logical errors, which are almost always a combination of the operating system’s and the drive’s fault.

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Computer Technicians 203: Hard Disk Failures

Simultaneous Translation
Much like the motherboard’s BIOS, any optical drive (which includes CD-RW, DVD-RW and their read-only counterparts) you encounter has to have a firmware chip – that is, something that handles the input-output data of the drive, controls the drive speed, manages the laser intensity and handles the regional code management system in case of DVD drives. The BIOS controls the input-output of the whole motherboard and some of its peripherals without going into details; on the other hand, the optical firmware handles its own working while going into details – every time you insert a CD or DVD, the firmware directs the lens to the tracks, spins the media up to speed depending on the location of the current track, and takes care of the data in both directions, ensuring whatever you read or write gets there properly.
Now, you’re probably thinking why you’d want to fix what isn’t broken. Common sense says exactly that. Engineers say quite the opposite, though: if it’s not broken, it doesn’t have enough features. Firmware upgrades are designed to give you a compromise, the best of both worlds – getting more features while keeping the drive from exploding. Or, at the very least, having it still reading and writing properly.

Mirror, mirror on the disc
So, what are all the benefits of a reflashed drive? To begin with, we’ll examine the differences between official and unofficial firmwares. Official firmware upgrades are usually sanctioned by the manufacturer themselves, and offer better reading and writing performance. To explain this, let’s delve into the data on a blank medium. Contrary to popular belief, no CD-R(W) or DVD-R(W) medium is truly blank even before writing onto it. The whole disc actually has a long spiral groove going along it, from the inside rim of the recordable area to the outside. This groove, called the ATIP (Absolute Time-In Pregroove) helps the drive read synchronously because it wobbles at a right angle to the groove – and since the drive’s reading along the groove, it can accurately clock itself and measure its rate of reading. The lead-in area (the one prior to the writable section) contains the ATIP as well – however, it holds several extra important bits of info. It includes data on the actual manufacturer of the medium, the type of dye used in the manufacturing process,m the maximum space on the actual disc and the maximum speed at which it was rated for recording.
How does that affect you as the end user? Simply put, each flash firmware contains a look-up table of manufacturers, dyes and speeds. Once the DVD reads the lead-in ATIP, it compares the block of data already in there to the look-up table. If they coincide, the DVD will get burned at, say 4x speed. A newer firmware (official or not) has the look-up table slightly upgraded, so to speak, so a medium previously burnable at 4x might now be rated for 8x burning – this is the result of testing a drive with media after its release. Along with that, a flashed recorder can also determine the laser intensity much better, which is good because nobody wants a caramelized DVD. Obviously, official firmware mostly helps recorders, not readers.

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Computer Technicians 202.5: Optical Drives and Firmware Flashing

Life in a silicon box
The BIOS – or Basic Input-Output System – is the lowest level of hardware-software interfacing a regular user can access. While it commonly refers only to the software side of it (the so-called system setup), in this course we’ll use the term to describe both the software and the hardware it’s stored in.
Looking from a hardware perspective, the BIOS is a small integrated circuit usually located near one of the corners of the motherboard. The BIOS is usually stored inside a PROM, EEPROM or flash ROM. The key difference between the three possible ROM types is their age and programmability. PROMs (Programmable Read-Only Memories) are the oldest type which was designed to be programmed once and once-only, similar to a CD-ROM, and are usually only encountered on very old PCs (predating 1990). EEPROMs (Electrically Erasable PROMs) are the “medium” type designed as reprogrammable, but still aren’t too common on today’s machines. Flash ROMs have been a de facto standard for a long while now, and, naturally, they inherit the reprogrammability EEPROMs have. BIOS ROMs are accompanied by a smaller CMOS memory circuit which stores the BIOS settings, while some motherboards may also have a second BIOS ROM chip – more on this later.
Looking on it as a software piece, the BIOS contains the basic instructions that allow the computer to function as a whole by preparing the various components, first by running a POST sequence (power-on self-test), and later providing the full OS with means to handle components. In the past, the BIOS functioned as the sole interface through which all components communicated. While it’s no longer true, the BIOS still handles important instructions and allows the user to customize the settings in order to get the maximum performance or stability out of the system.

Messing with the settings
While BIOS does indeed stand for Basic Input-Output System, it’s interesting to note it’s pronounced the same way as the greek word for life – something it’s definitely suited for, as it decides how the machine will act once power is switched on. Although there are several prominent BIOS manufacturers and programmers, such as American Megatrends, Phoenix Technologies and Award International, most of the BIOS interfaces are organized similarly, nevermind the graphical layout. Accessing the BIOS usually involves hitting the DEL, F2 or any other function key during boot-up sequence – this varies depending on the exact motherboard. Some of the more common sections of the average Award BIOS, for instance, are:

• Standard BIOS settings – these usually contain the system time and date setup, as well as the basic IDE or SATA drive settings. The latter are usually set to AUTO so the system would autodetect the connected disks or DVD-ROMs on boot.
• Advanced BIOS settings – these contain settings such as hard-drive boot priority, general boot device priority (for kickstarting brand new machines), as well as RAM latency settings on better motherboards.
• Integrated peripherals – these allow you to change the funcionality of various integrated element such as onboard sound, network connectors, parallel and serial ports and the like.
• Power management – this section sets how the machine will power up and shut down, i.e. whether pressing the power button will instantly shut the machine down, or if you’ll have to keep it pressed for 4 seconds. This section also covers more advanced options such as Wake-on-Ring or Wake-on-LAN.
• PC Health – a relative newcomer to BIOS screens, this one is useful if you want to check on voltages and temperatures, and also lets you set the alarm if the CPU temperature exceeds a certain level.

All in all, the available settings will vary wildly depending on the actual motherboard, since different ones have different features, naturally.

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Computer Technicians 202: BIOS Functions and Firmware Flashing

Defining the playing field
First of all, let’s make a clear distinction between the a home and a SoHo, or Small Office-Home Office. On average, a home setup will have one or two computers, with no more than three or four users, and will be located at the client’s place of residence. On the other hand, a SoHo can consist of anything from a single to ten computers, each belonging to a single employee, with an occasional extra machine acting as a server, all located well outside the main commercial part of the town or city, possibly in a residential block. Take what we said about the locations of the SoHos with a grain of salt: the locations aren’t strict, but SoHos are lower on the complexity scale than even small businesses, so they usually can’t afford top-story space in an office building, or even a small office building – they’re usually located very close to other residents. While you will usually encounter a single-computer-single-connection system in an average home (not counting the occasional wired or wireless network allowing more computers to go online), SoHos usually have a much more complex infrastructure, usually consisting of a server box, a router, a switch, user boxes (or terminals) and the whole wireless or WiFi network covering the entire office space, sometimes with a network printer. In other words, with home repairs you were relatively safer because you only had a single computer and connection to worry about. When conducting tech work for a SoHo, you have quite a few extra factors to account for. On the other hand, the brands of computers might not differ so much between SoHos and homes – home users who require external help for repairs are in the same position as SoHos, relatively speaking, so they tend to use prefabricated computers, even though that does not have to be the absolute, depending on whether they had prior help in assembling configurations.

SoHos and command chains
If you’d been somehow informed a SoHo needs your technical help, chances are it was through one of the employees – at early stages, word of mouth is the most cost-efficient way to get requests, even though it’s not work-efficient. As we explained in Advertising your computer business, using multiple ways to get clients is better than relying on one simply because you get different employer profiles – in our case, word of mouth and free newspaper ads work the best. As with any other job, try to inquire about the nature of the problem beforehand, and accept or decline the job accordingly.
Either way, once you’ve gotten the attention of said small office, it’s time to actually go there and meet the person in charge. Your first step should be to find the person who contacted you; in one case, the employee whose computer you recently repaired, in another case, the person who called you about your advertisement, usually either a secretary or a PR person. Once you’ve found them and introduced yourself, you should first inquire a bit about the profile of the other employees. In some cases, SoHos have technicians, but they might not have as much expertise to deal with whatever you’ve been called to fix, are looking for a second opinion, or are simply engaged in a work project. In other cases, they might have computer engineers who are narrowly specialized and simply haven’t ever had the need to repair a computer (although chances of that are relatively slim, it does happen!). Finally, maybe the SoHo doesn’t even have a technician, something that might work to your advantage provided you can respond to their semi-frequent calls.
Your next step should be to ask to meet the director or manager, whichever title is commonly used locally. After the introduction, you should mention who your reference is, and explain in simple terms what you preliminarily think might be the cause and what might have to be done as a solution. Now, even though computers and all the following technology have come into every pore of life today, don’t use complicated terminology. Unless you’re certain the manager has a degree of understanding computers, don’t complicate – use relatively simple explanations and be concise. That way you’ll convey the idea directly and you’ll be able to give your employer an insight into what needs to be done without boring them with details. Before closing off the initial conversation, list how much the repair will cost before you set to work – that way you’ll instantly know if the deal is off or if you’re set to work. If both you and the employer are satisfied with the deal, you’ve got the green light – get to work.

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Computer Technicians 201: Expanding your market – SoHo repairs

Making diagnoses is probably one of the toughest parts of the job. Yes, in most cases, getting a steady supply of clients can be daunting, but making an accurate prognosis of what’s really wrong with the computer is something that’s just bound to give you a headache, both when you’re new to the job and when you can already repair in your sleep. In the former case, it’s because you can’t think of what’s wrong; in the latter, it’s because you can think of too many possibilities. Either way, you’re bound to get a light headache, but once you let the dust in your head settle a bit, you’ll be able to coolly decide which course of action to take.

Gather your info while you may
The very first step in discovering what exactly is wrong with your target computer is a lot simpler than you might think. The moment you meet the client, try to get as much information about the problem. Now, in most cases, the client doesn’t really understand how the computer works, so what you’ll get can range from a pretty graphic “it goes past the first black screen, shows the Windows XP logo, turns blue and then restarts” to a very generic “it won’t start”. If it’s the former, you’ve already got material to start thinking. If it’s the latter, you’ll have to do a bit of questioning. Or, if the client really doesn’t know, watch the boot sequence with them, provided the machine even gets up to booting.
Generally, you can guess whether it’s the software or hardware’s fault from the moment things start going wrong. If something goes wrong up to the power-on-self-test (POST) procedure, it’s almost definitely a hardware fault – this includes the computer not booting up at all. Once it gets to booting, software comes into view, depending on the error – just looking at the Blue Screen message can give you an insight into what caused it. Once the desktop is up and operational, while hardware may be to blame in some cases (such as instant hangs, the screen going black and losing power or glitchy images), the fault is almost sure to be a software one. Granted, there are some pretty freaky occurences that’ll make you wonder how it wasn’t the hardware’s or software’s fault, but they’re just that – freaky occurences. End-user problems are a category on their own, unfortunately.

Bottom-up approach – see the stone, ignore the pebbles
Once you’ve determined the most likely cause of the problem, you need to mentally list off all the most obvious, accessible or common causes. In case of a failure to even start, the most obvious cause is the PSU, while the easiest to access are the power supply cables – both internal and external. In case of a POST error (accompanied by either PC speaker beeps), the most obvious cause would be the motherboard itself – however, in practice, the most common cause is an inadequately plugged expansion card or RAM bank. In case of an OS problem, the most obvious and common cause is either the OS itself or the last installed application which collided with something.
Generally speaking, once you’ve done quite a few repair jobs, you’ll already have a mental map of the most common causes and you’ll be able to generally guess what caused the problem – even to the point of knowing some oddball cases, such as graphical glitches being caused by fading video RAM. However, you should always lead yourself by the KISS rule – Keep It Simple, Stupid. By far the best way to diagnose is to always look at the big players – the PSU, the motherboard, the RAM and the OS. While a sound card for instance, can cause a lot of trouble if it malfunctions, it’s among the rarest troublemakers. Ironically enough, a CPU failure, which is the brain of the average computer, is just as rare unless the client’s been doing something extremely unsafe (and therefore, written off as a user error). Once you’ve diagnosed which general part caused the problem, you can start doing more detailed diagnostics.

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Computer Technicians 104: Making Computer Diagnoses

The Voltage Collection
The first thing you need to learn is what different voltages (measured in Volts, V) there are inside your computer, what they’re used for, what else there is beside power lines, and what to do in order to avoid disaster when digging under your computer’s hood. Since there’s no need for it, there is no AC (alternating current) power coming from the PSU to the rest of the computer – it’s all DC (direct current). Basically, all lines on the various power connectors can be divided into three categories: power, ground and signal. All the pins are color-coded according to the table beside this article.

The three most common voltages encountered are +12V, +5V and +3.3V. The first one, +12V is connected wherever there’s a motor spinning or a bigger power sink – optical drives and hard-disks are the most obvious examples, although the motherboard needs it as well. The second one, is used by electronic circuitry, again, most commonly on drives and the motherboard, because most integrated circuits were designed with +5V in mind, because it’s a convenient voltage. The final one, +3.3V, is essential to the motherboard (and newer SATA drives), and most low-level voltages (the CPU core voltage and the RAM voltage) used on the motherboard are derived from it. Two of the voltages also have their counterparts, -5V and -12V, and those are used by some expansion cards – these voltages are the exact opposites of their positive brothers… but opposite compared to what?

This is where the ground comes in. In layman’s terms, GND can be considered +0V – although it’s not electrotechnically correct, you can basically assume any positive voltage is an electricity source, and every ground is an electricity sinkhole. The opposite applies for negative voltages, since they’re below ground level. Nearly all GND lines are situated on the same row and directly beside their assigned voltages, because you can not always guarantee all GND lines are on the same voltage. However, in most cases, you can assume all GND lines are on the same level, sometimes called a common ground (COM) Note that the special.

Finally, there are special lines. Some special lines are similar to voltage lines in the sense that they have an assigned voltage. However, their primary function is communication between the PSU and the motherboard, signalling things like proper PSU activity or functioning as a PSU kickstarter. They will be explained later on, together with the main ATX connector.

Despite the various voltages, which can be measured using a multimeter, they’re not the only ones vital to the PSU. Although all pin circuits should, when measured from power pin to ground pin, show a voltage within +-5% (for +3.3V and +5V) or +-10% (+-12V), current is equally as important. Current (measured in Amperes, A) is the amount of charge the power supply can put out through a specific voltage circuit per second. A power supply usually gives out tens of amperes on +5V and +3.3V rails, since most of the computer is power-hungry circuitry. +12V usually gets just as much, and -12V is used rarely enough to warrant under 1A. Note that you can sometimes guess the amount of current running through a wire by its width – the thicker the wire, the more current can flow through it.

Finally, the overall value of the PSU is its power (measured in Watts, W) – no doubt you’ve seen advertisements about 300W, 350W, 400W or even whooping 700W supplies – it can output that amount of raw power… in ideal circumstances. In reality, you won’t ever get the whole power out of it. Most decent PSU manufacturers list the power efficiency factor on their websites – an average value would be 70%, so a 350W PSU can output around 275W of power. The power supply output can be measured and calculated, but it involves several measurements of both voltage and current and a foot-long calculation – we’ll leave that as your homework.

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To get started with your own computer business, check out our Computer Business Kit. If you want to learn how to repair laptops, check out these narrated, high definition videos. These would pay for themselves in 1 repair job.

Computer Technicians 103: Knowing your power (supply)