Ultimate PC Troubleshooting Guide

Here's the painful truth: Your computer has more mysterious disorders than a season's worth of ER episodes--agonizing error messages, sickening slowdowns, and even the tragic blue screen of death. To cure these techno-maladies, you need expert attention. You need us.

Meet your team of seasoned PC health care professionals: Kirk Steers, hardware specialist and author of PC World's Hardware Tips department, and Steve Bass, software maven and Home Office columnist. We get tons of letters and e-mail messages from readers with PC problems, so we put our heads together to provide you with the most useful troubleshooting advice--from solving printer problems to speeding up poky Web connections.

Of course, guys as opinionated as Kirk and Steve didn't always see eye to eye. "I see Steve's approach to troubleshooting as fast and furious," says Kirk.

"And I think Kirk is way too quick to crack open a machine's case, when a software fix might do the job," retorts Steve.

But our differences are good news for you: We took the best elements from both of these points of view and compiled a thorough troubleshooting guide that offers solutions for everybody--PC newcomers and grizzled veterans alike.

Contributing Editor Steve Bass writes the Home Office column and is the president of the Pasadena IBM Users Group. You can sign up for his " Tips and Tweaks" newsletter to get more troubleshooting tips. Contributing Editor Kirk Steers writes the Hardware Tips column.