Tonight’s class was one of our surgery sessions. I had two computer’s booked in for overhauls. Veteran student of the group, Roger, had problems with the performance of his computer, and the second machine was an RM All-In-One PC that I had borrowed and brought in, that needed wiping!
Roger’s computer, a Dell Dimension 9110, pictured above, had issues when it booted up. After running MSConfig and tweaking a few of the options, stopping some non-essential services, clearing some of the Internet options, and resetting some defaults, the computer seemed to be ok. Roger’s computer also had a problem with the card reader on the front of it – it wouldn’t read cards! By going into the Device Manager, and removing the card-reader drives, then allowing the computer to redetect and reinstall, the device worked. We then proceeded to test the device by looking at Roger’s holiday photographs of his recent visit to Italy – very nice too!
The second computer, an RM All-In-One, which as the name suggests, is a computer where its a complete unit, with everything built in. You simply plug a keyboard and mouse into it. This one, a five year old model needed rebuilding, as over time it had gotten quite slow!
In recent years, bundled recovery CD-ROMs have become less common, as some computer manufacturers are now utilising hard drive partitions to store the recovery data. Accessing hard drive based system recovery is usually performed by pressing a specific key combination during or after the computer's start up. Partition based recovery systems are usually faster than their disc based counterparts since the data is directly on the hard drive and no disc swapping is needed. They can also be cheaper for the manufacturer because they do not need to ship recovery CDs with the computer, adding the price of creating them to the cost of the computer.
After simply pressing “double Shift” at a specific time, which was the RM’s specific way of performing this task, I was able to quickly demonstrate how to restore the computer to it’s original factory shipped state. Fortunately also this particular computer had preinstalled software on it too, which was also apart o the recovery procedure. 10 mins later the computer was sorted – ready to run! Job done!!
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