Computer Technicians 102: The Essential Utility Kit

In our introduction to the CT series we explained the basics of assembling a good toolbox that’ll help you deal with hardware issues. However, as you already know, there’s the other side of the computer duality. Software, while not something you can touch, feel, or throw against the wall, is generally bound to give you more trouble. If you arrive to a computer that won’t power up, you know it’s a hardware failure for sure. If, however, it won’t boot into the OS, or boots up to trouble, the odds are in favor of a software issue. And since you were summoned, you need to make sure you have as many utilities at your disposal as possible.

Note that your utility collection should be kept as “freeware” as possible. This does not limit your functionality at all. For one, you don’t have to worry about licensing programs and distributing them as most are intended as programs to be shared around during normal usage (naturally, it might vary with certain programs – read the license agreements for details). Even though a program’s a freeware, that doesn’t negate the fact the author isn’t working on patching bugs and bringing improvements – in fact, if the utility proves useful, you can generally expect frequent and stable updates.
So, grab your pen and paper – here goes the listing.

Easy access, early detection

Suppose the computer you’re about to repair can boot up into the OS for a moment, say, something from the Windowss series. While the desktop’s loading, you should ask the customer to give as much detail as possible about the problem. Before you start working on anything else, using a utility such as Everest Home will give you a direct view of just what’s installed in the computer without opening it physically or digging through the Device Manager. Once you’ve discovered what kind of machine you’re working on, you can start dealing with the problem itself. Generally, you can divide the problems into two basic types:

• virus and spyware infections

One of the most common reasons why a computer slows down – a virus embedded itself in the system and is eating away at the resources. Or, a mysterious toolbar latched itself onto the browser. Or, all of a sudden, the start page links to a page loaded with questionable (and probably illegal) content, and you can’t move off it. The first set of utilities worth loading up is HijackThis!, StartupList and IBProcMan. These three tools will, once you learn how to use them, give you an insight into what’s booting up, what’s running actively and what’s peering at you from the depths of RAM. After a while you’ll be able to identify which processes are neccessary for the OS to survive, which ones are needed for the peripherals like the printer or modem, and which ones are malicious. Once you’ve gathered the info, installing and running a good set of cleaning utilities is your primary way of getting it back into shape. Our Basic Computer Protection and Defense article explains the utilities you’ll need to clean up the mess the viruses have created.

• driver glitches

The second most common type of trouble encountered are driver malfunctions. This includes anything from the motherboard to graphics, sound, networking, scanners and plenty of other peripherals. Obviously, the list of drivers you’d have to tote around is too big, considering how many individual manufacturers exist. However, almost all of them are based on common graphical chips or chipsets, so you can narrow it down to four major players: ATi, Intel, nVidia and VIA. Most, if not all of them, post monthly updates to their driver sets, which are usually aimed at very broad ranges of products, so just getting a package release is going to insure you can cover most of the cases. Make sure you download a version for both Windows 98/Me and 2000/XP, as you never know which OS you’ll run into.

Naturally, there are many more contingencies you can run into while fixing a machine – however, these two are the most basic ones. You will learn to expand your utility disk with time as you discover just in how many ways a computer can go bad.

Difficult access, punching your way through

Here’s an aspect of computer use you’ll only learn to appreciate once you master it – using an alternative OS to bull-rush your way past a faulty Windows installation, such as a Linux distribution. Depending on how it’s used, Linux may require a bit of adjustment – it can run either in command-line mode or as a full-blown graphical interface reminiscent of Windows. Once you’ve understood how to use the alternative, such as the excellent Knoppix LiveCD, all you’ll have to do is boot from the CD and you’ll have the whole target harddrive at your disposal – so you can, say, burn data off a harddrive whose Windows installation’s gone belly-up. Along with Knoppix, a set of pre-assembled boot disks such as Hiren’s BootCD and Ultimate Boot CD should become a permanent resident on your trips to repair jobs.

Lock, stock, and a spindle of CDs

Aside from the already prepared CDs, most of your utility collection can fit on a single 700MB CD or a small USB key. Not only that, but you can use the remaining space for any other utilities you can think of – 7-Zip, FoxItReader, Portable Firefox… whatever you feel you might need in the future. As you’ve probably realized, assembling your perfect utility CD isn’t an instant thing – it might take you a month, or even a year to decide which utilities to pick, which to keep, and which not to update because the program author cut support for it.Creating your toolkit isn’t hard – for instance, Hiren’s CD and UBCD are good guidelines for your own – but it takes time to search the internet, planning to decide which tool is the most usable for a situation, and finally, it takes courage to actually use it on a job. But done properly, you toolkit will serve you for many jobs to come, and using them at work will become second nature – once you’re advanced enough to know just when and where to apply them.

 
Written by Boris M