A computer generates a lot of heat. The heat is usually concentrated in four areas inside the computer — the power supply (which generates some heat), the RAM modules, the video card, and lastly the processor. Each of these hardware parts generate various amounts of heat, with the processor generating the most amount of heat.
If you want your PC to perform at its optimum and limit the chances of having a hardware failure, you have to make sure that your PC has enough air circulating inside to cool down the PC. Put fans inside the PC to help warm air circulate. Exhaust fans also help tremendously by expelling warm air and allowing cool air to enter the case.

One drive systems usually have no jumpers while two or more drive systems can have them installed. Set your errant drive as the slave and the master drive (the new one) as the master drive. Install the drive and screw securely while ensuring all power cables and connectors are set in their proper places before you power up. Partition the new drive if desired and format each partition (this ensures no malicious programs might have been innocently???? left in the drive during testing by the retailer or manufacturer) even if the retailer who sold you the drive says it is factory formatted. Re-install the OS, drivers and all the other programs; re-copy all the necessary files and you’re all set to go. Oh, don’t forget to take out the errant drive after you copy all your documents and files (the drive can fail and damage the computer if the controller board shorts due to failure of the mechanical parts damaging the rest of your computer including the new drive).

If you do not have a secondary drive, better get hold of one fast but try to determine the type of the drive the system board supports (IDE, SCSI, ATA or SATA) so you buy the right one. If the drive type is no longer available (most areas have already phased out IDE drives being replaced by SATA drives), then you might be in for more of an overhaul rather than a troubleshooting expedition. A change in most of the parts may be necessary and the files that have to be transferred might be done on another computer which still supports your drive type or by the computer shop should you like them to do so(for a fee of course. Professional data retrieval would be too expensive for the ordinary PC and the data stored in it). Remove the plastic sheath or case of the new drive and check the jumper settings.

Now, to make the secondary drive your primary drive (after you have transferred all necessary files to that said drive), open the casing and locate your hard drive. Don’t forget to discharge any static electricity by touching the casing for a few seconds to ground yourself discharging the offending static charge in your body. Turn the power off and remove all the cables from the rear and front of the casing. Unscrew the hard drives and try to find the master and slave which can be seen in the jumper settings near the drive connector, also disconnect the power supply from the drives. If you have managed to identify the master and slave drives, remove the failing drive and change the jumper setting of the slave to configure it into the master drive(this would be easier if the master and slave were both formatted with their own MBR’s or main boot records). Connect all necessary cables and power up your computer and begin the setup procedure of your OS. Once the OS is re-set-up, reinstall all applications, drivers and other programs you may need and you can now transfer the copied files to their rightful place for use.

Don’t count on system restore for this one for it only works best for software errors and not for hardware failure. If you do not have a secondary hard disk installed, or you might not have enough space to house all your files and the OS in the drive you were left with, then sadly you have to get a new drive to augment or replace the drive that is about to fail considering the fact that the failing drive hasn’t seized up yet. If that were the case, you can curse all you want but say good bye to all your documents and important files whatever type they may be.

Even new drives can crash if there was a problem within the manufacturing process. They have been tested and tested again before delivery to the store but defects do get through the testing programs. If you happen to have more than one drive on your PC, that would be nice and would make the copy process easier. Just select all the files you need and copy them into a temporary folder where you can retrieve them later in the other drive once it is set up to boot as the primary drive. The primary or master drive is the one that has the operating system installed onto it which in many cases would be Windows.

Well, this might not be a sound you would want to hear from your hard drive, for it might be in it’s death throes. The screeching sound may be the bearings that make the platters spin breaking down or they have been in use for so long they have worn out the hard metal coatings on the teeny tiny bearings. The first thing you do is to copy as much data that you can to another hard drive to prevent total disaster. Most drives will continue to function for sometime before total failure of the drive. You’ll be glad to know that they have become more reliable than ever but that does not mean totally.

You are browsing the net and you get tired so you take a break and return to a computer with no display, what do you do? First of all, don�t panic and see if the CPU is still functioning with blinking lights or the power LED (the green thingy that is always on when you use your PC). If it is blinking, the PC has turned itself off going into sleep mode, look for the wake-up key on the keyboard and press, you�re back in business. If it still fails, sorry but you�ll have to turn off the CPU (computer actually) by pressing the Power Button until the power led turns off and the fan stops humming. Disconnect all cables and connectors from the CPU and open the casing making sure you touch the case before doing anything else (this discharges static electricity which could fry expensive microelectronics like your motherboard, memory module, CPU, etc).

The �blue screen� as it is more commonly called can be a simple sign that your computer is overheating and more ventilation is needed. This can be addresses with a couple of extra cooling fans or that the existing fans might be dirty and chock full of dust and grime. This can even be a sign of memory module failure which can also be attributed to overheating ( some memory modules literally cook on the boards giving off the nasty smell of burned plastic). Cooling improvements and replacement can remedy the situation granted that no other motherboard components have been cooked to a crisp.

Many of us have experienced it many times over, the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death” when using personal computers or just about any computer as a matter of fact. Mostly associated with windows errors, this is called a memory dump which signifies that windows in it�s many versions has encountered an unrecoverable error and has ceased to function. This is a signal to panic for the term paper or presentation you�ve just spent the whole week making and refining has turned to dust hopefully which you might have had a back-up file on some other form of medium.