How to repair a computer without the help of a technician

It happens to those who work in the computer field to be frequently called by friends or relatives when they have problems on their PCs.

So let’s try to make a brief guide to show how you can avoid calling a technician to repair your computer when it is not working anymore or if it is not working properly.

The only requirement is time and patience, necessary to investigate the causes of the problem.

Even if you were unable to repair the computer yourself, it is important to understand what is causing the problem to limit repair costs.

Why call the technician
In general, whoever goes to the technician to repair the computer is in one of these cases:

He has no time to do it alone; He thinks he doesn’t have the skills to solve the problem; It does not have the original operating system DVD to reinstall the system; Even if he has the installation DVD, he doesn’t use it for fear of losing all the data, photos and documents.
He needs to replace a piece of hardware, but he’s worried about doing it himself or doesn’t know how to do it.

Possible problems of computer failure
When a computer has a problem, we can distinguish 5 different cases:

1) Does not turn on anymore.
If it does not turn on its own, the problem is related to the power supply which is not an easy piece to replace alone, but which costs very little to repair it.

2) It starts but gives error before the writing of the operating system appears Computer technicianIf the operating system does not load its own, the problem may be a broken hard disk (or almost) or damaged RAM.

To verify that the RAM memory has no problems you can use a tool called Memtest (present for example in the Lubuntu CD) and loaded by starting the PC from the DVD player.

While the change of the RAM does not give any inconvenience, in replacing the hard disk it is necessary to think of the data inside it which, probably, you want to recover (if you do not have a backup on another internal or external disk).

The trick is to mount the new hard disk just bought, without removing the broken one that needs to become secondary.
To recover data from the damaged hard disk you can

Save everything on the new hard disk using a Linux Live CD like Lubuntu Connect the hard disk to a working PC with an adapter to copy the data The best solution however is to install the operating system on the new hard disk and then use the old disk as a secondary and transfer the data.

3) Windows loads correctly, but nothing can be done and everything seems to be blocked In this case, in 95% of cases, the fault is a virus.
Unless of a resounding case, it is always possible to remove a virus or malware, by itself, using recovery CDs if the computer becomes unusable.

You can use tools like Combofix to remove malware and a good antivirus, like Avast Anti-virus , to scan all the files to clean up those infected. This discourse decays if you use a Linux system, where there are no such problems.