that cover Windows operating system troubleshooting
so what I'm going to be doing over these next few episodes
is covering that exact issue.
Now, you can make Windows troubleshooting a lot easier
if you break it down into chunks.
I basically break all Windows operating system problems
into three pieces.
The first piece are the boot problems.
and it can't even start Windows
because Windows is messed up.
The second one is Windows is trying to load
but it never really gets to a desktop
or something bizarre happens and the bottom line is
you can't really log into the system.
The third one is you can log into Windows
and you're at a desktop, but bizarre things are happening.
Error screens are popping up,
the computer's freezing
or the dreaded blue screen of death.
So what I want to do is talk
about these three different things
and I want to start with the very basic one
which is the A+ calls a black screen,
which I think is actually kind of funny
because first of all, what is a black screen?
So you got to be really careful here.
You could have, say, a laptop
that all of a sudden it goes to a black screen
because it's in a Hibernate mode
and you're having trouble getting it out of Hibernate mode.
So when we get into laptops,
we're going to talk about Hibernate
and all that kind of stuff.
Is the computer actually turned on?
I can't tell you how many times
people have called me up at my very expensive hourly rate
only to find me walk over and go.
Try it again, okay.
So don't let those sneak by you.
The other issue that you can run into
is there a problem with, for example, your boot order?
So we'll talk about that in a second.
The one black screen of death
and this one terrifies me 'cause it's a real pain
is that your computer is booting up.
It's booting up.
In fact, Windows is actually running,
but because the screen is black,
I feel compelled to talk about this right now
and that is device driver issues.
Nothing causes more pain and anguish than device drivers.
In particular, for graphics cards.
If you're, especially if you install a new graphics card,
you've had the audacity to update a driver,
something like that and all of a sudden
you boot up and you can hear your computer booting
(mimics computer beeping) and everything sounds happy
and the hard drive's going (mimics computer chugging)
but all of a sudden, the screen is black.
My friends, you have a problem with the device driver
and you got to get to it.
So let's talk about that real quick.
Number one, you've got to get into safe mode.
So in order episodes, we talk about
the different ways to get into safe mode
and that particular situation,
since everything's going black,
you probably going to have to be rebooting the computer
multiple times that you will get into safe mode
and then you have to get into the device driver
and do some roll backs.
So we're going to pretend that my system's
actually in safe mode right now
and let's take a look at what we're going to be doing here.
I'm going to boot the system up
and I'm in safe mode, so if this is causing trouble,
he's still going to be there,
but he's just not going to be really working.
What I can do is this.
So I'm going to right-click
and you see I've got some options here.
Don't worry about these options.
Let's go into Properties.
And this is where exciting stuff happens.
Number one, I'm going to be taking a look at the driver itself
and it can give me details.
For example, watch the driver versions.
It blows me away how techs don't take time
to understand driver versions
particularly for graphic cards.
I've got these things memorized
like my social security number
because there continue to be issues over and over again.
I may not know the exact version number
The other big problem that you'll run into
when you have black screen issues that are device oriented
is that something happened to make that particular device
go kaboom, and these things are all
recorded automatically within Windows.
You just have to know where to look for these events.
Events, you want to view the events?
That's right, Event Viewer.
Event Viewer is basically built in
to the properties of any particular device.
Let me show you what I mean.
So you come over to Events
and it will have time stamps for certain things
that have taken place,
but if you want to, you can actually zoom in on this
and go right into good old Event Viewer.
Now look what it does.
It actually pulls up just for one specific device.
This is very, very convenient.
It's basically the same information you see here
but it gives you a little bit more.
So for example, if I zoom in on this,
I'm going to get all kinds of googlety-goc here
that might give me some information about the problem.
What you're going to be looking for
is the last event before everything went kaboom.
Now, you're not going to be able to read all that stuff.
I can't either, but a quick cut and paste
into any web browser and you're going to discover
you're one of 50 million people
who've already had that problem
and a fix will be there ready to go.
All right, now, in this particular case
we're talking about something that is in my opinion
not a true black screen,
because Windows actually booted up
but I think it's important to bring that up.
When I'm talking about first layer problems,
I'm talking about Windows can't even boot up.
In fact, a lot of times, you can't even find Windows
and the number one cause of this pain
more than anything else are thumb drives.
Thumb drives are great but the problem is
is that your boot order in your system setup
may boot to these guys,
especially if you've got like a Linux installation ISO
on here or something like that,
you could wreak havoc on some poor person
who thinks it's walking into a Windows system
and one day they fire up their computer
and it's, Would you like to install Ubuntu? (laughs)
Okay, I don't get out a lot.
For me, this stuff is funny.
Anyway, boot order is a big deal.
What you need to be doing
is that if you get any type of black screen
or if you get an error, for example,
no operating system available,
find another boot device and press Enter,
these types of errors.
The first thing you need to do is can around.
Do you have a thumb drive in there?
Do you have something in there
that's messing with your boot order?
Secondly, if you're really unsure,
go into your system setup and reset your boot order
to make sure you're booting off your Windows drive first
and then that way, you can get around that problem.
The other big issue that we run into
that makes screens just black
is that you've done something.
Now, this often still points to devices
but it can, adding a new hard drive, adding more RAM.
A lot of times, in a hardware issue,
it's going to prevent Windows from even being located.
In these particular cases, the right answer
is just undo what you just did
and see if Windows boots up.
That way, you can zero in on a particular piece of hardware
and again, you're never on the bleeding edge
of these problems.
Anything that's gone wrong has already happened
to 50,000 other people.
This is where you pull up your laptop or your phone,
you type in the issue
and you're going to find a forum somewhere
that's going to give you the answer that you need.
Now, if Windows itself, the boot files for Windows corrupts,
that could be a big problem.
Luckily for us, WinRE does a great job at this.
So what we can do with WinRE
is just go ahead and use your repair thumb drive
or if you don't have anything else, your installation media,
go into your WinRE, do a repair install
or people always skip this one but it works pretty good,
is that you can actually do a rolling back
to particular point in the past
and then just see what happens.
A lot of times, it's a bit of guesswork in here
and you'll be in good shape.
If it's really corrupted,
you probably have a hard drive issue
and you have to reinstall Windows from scratch anyway.
Have fun with that.
Good thing you got a backup, huh?