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PC Problems? Fix 'Em Yourself

Taming tech glitches is easy--once you know what to do. Our troubleshooting guide shows how to solve them like a pro.

Michael Desmond and Woody Leonhard

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Has this ever happened to you? You spend hours upon hours trying to fix some problem with your PC. You search Web forums, you uninstall programs, you swap out hardware, but you can't figure out what's wrong. Finally you explain the problem to a friend or even (gasp!) a tech support representative. Inevitably, your advisor suggests that you change a simple setting, and, presto: Your machine works again.

That's often the way it goes when you're fixing tech products. It takes forever to track down a problem and then about 2 minutes to solve it. But if you know a few tricks for diagnosing difficulties with PCs, cameras, TVs, and other devices, you can shrink hours down to minutes. Tell us the symptoms, and we'll help you pinpoint the problem in this handy troubleshooting guide. We'll walk you through possible causes, from minor to moderate to dire. And--oh yeah--we'll tell you how to fix each problem, too.

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