For the past few weeks, our computer has been acting up. We have a bad harddrive, so I had just chalked it up to it and didn’t think too much more about it. Apparently it was more than the bad harddrive. We got an error message about a missing .DLL file. Well, that is easy enough to fix. You just use the recovery console on your Windows disk to replace the missing file. That didn’t work and after half a day of fooling with it, we decided just to reinstall Windows.
At least we didn’t lose any files since we didn’t format the drive. But still it’s a pain because all of our programs needed to be reinstalled. This brought to my attention the importance of keeping up with your driver disks and purging the older ones that you no longer use. We built our computer five years ago. It took me a moment to remember the brand of the motherboard and video card. At least most of our disks are in a CD binder, but at least half the disks are obsolete. It’s time to have a good purging.
Our computer has been very reliable. We had a harddrive failure in 2008. That could have been the last time we opened the case because it was quite dusty in there. We bought some can air – a supply we used to always have on hand – and cleaned out the inch thick layer of dust. I think that helped more than anything to get better performance from the computer.
So, from now on we will keep a check on the inside of our computer. When we check the smoke alarm batteries with the time change, then we will also check for dust in our computer.
I know how “devastating” it is to hear that the computer crashed. I guess we are accustomed to the fact that PCs are reliable and endurable but the fact is that there are a lot of sensitive components that a little dust can mess them around. Nowadays, reinstalling the operating system can be a pain in the neck not to mention how time consuming it is. I guess that our PCs are like our friends, you have to take good care about them
I have had this happen to me as well. I found a big thing is to check the dust and blow it out with a can of compressed gas duster. People never think to do this, but it really works!