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Diagnostics for your computerI got a call from a Green who said that following complete scans (she used WinClamAV, which has been highly recommended to me) and some AdAware knockoff, that she had been able to recover use of her machine and restore her desktop, only to find that her 'E' and 'S' keys now seem disabled. This was my advice to her about how to diagnose the issue, determine if she needed a registry cleaner or a new keyboard. I wrote: I'm urging you download and keep handy a copy of Knoppix (http://knoppix.net/get.php). Its a rescue / diagnostics / desktop work environment Live Boot CD. As with other live boot CDs, Knoppix will provide you with a working desktop including access to your hard drive and mature office suites and internet and other tools suitable for both office work and diagnostic and development work. It will auto configure itself to your hardware. It boots up in a couple of minutes. Put it in your computer and reboot. If you see windows again, reboot again and this time invoke the BIOS menu. Watch for instructions for which key to use for that at power on. Its frequently F1, F2 or F10. Make sure your machine will boot from the CD drive, save your changes and reboot again. Open your word document in OpenOffice Writer. You'll have the mozilla and likely other browsers as well available. Do your work. Test your keyboard. Do you have a hardware issue or a windows registrgy issue? Knoppix will run in your memory and will be slow in starting up new applications which are read off of a CD instead of a hard drive, unless you have a swap partition available to it. That also means it will run out of memory. I worked for months on a knoppix machine, with a local swap partition, saving my files on a remote server and rebooting about once a week when memory leaks would shut me down. You would have to consciously enable writing to your hard drive while using knoppix. I have friends who say they have written to and even resized ntfs partitions with the gpl tool set. I'm conservative of data and have never risked a clients data like that, and if I did, I would insist on a dd (datadumper) output ready to restore the entire partition with if necessary. I would suggest you save your files with an email to yourself until you work out a better arrangement. When you are through using Knoppix, shutdown the computer and remove it from the CD drive. Your MS OS with all of its infections will be available on your hard drive waiting to be rebooted.
Submitted by admin on Sun, 2009-01-25 16:56.
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