There are times that your computer may act strangely!  For an example, your computer may restart without prompting you.  Sometimes problems could be a bug within Windows and other software, and sometimes it may very well be a part of your computer such as RAM went bad.  One of the possible ways is to use Windows’ event logs to figure out the hidden errors and when such errors had happened.  To view event logs, you need to click on start button, and type in the search field with the keyword event, a list should be appearing after what you just did, and make sure to highlight and click on view event logs.

Unfortunately, even event logs could be helpful to only some users, because average users may not understand the error messages.  This is why you should do the obvious things even though to do all of these things could be time consuming.  Supposedly, after viewing the event logs, and you still have not a clue of why your computer behaves so strangely, you may need to go on and try to narrow down if the problem is related to hardware or software — in special case it could also be a malware or a virus or a rootkit.

Sometimes when a computer gets overheated, weird problems occur.  Make sure your computer has enough airflow, clean from dirt, and a working fan (or two); these should be enough to address the overheated problem.  If a power supply goes bad, you may not notice since it’s hard to track down a specific problem that could be related to a power supply.  For RAM, Windows 7 has a tool which allows you to do a diagnostic test to see if your computer’s RAM is working fine or not.  To do a memory (RAM) diagnostic test, you need to click on start button, type in the keyword memory in the search box, and make sure to click on Windows Memory Diagnostic.  You will get a prompt window to ask you to restart so your computer could do a RAM check, and so make sure you do just that.

Testing for software problems, it could be a real mess since you may have too many installations of different software on your computer.  You may not know which software is the culprit.  Sometimes cleaning up the registry may help solve the problems.  To clean up the registry, you could use programs such as Norton Utilties or CCleaner (free).  You could use anti-virus programs and anti-spyware programs to look for viruses and spyware and rootkits.

You should try to do the obvious things first before you pay a computer specialist to help fix your computer problems.  Paying someone to remove a computer problem could be expensive, and so the alternative way is to reinstall Windows when you have no important file to be kept on your computer.  When there are important files to be kept on your computer, you need to do a backup of those files before you go ahead and reinstall Windows.  Windows 7 does have a backup option for you to implement, but I suggest you should only use Windows 7′s backup feature when you know that your computer is clean of viruses and other malicious stuffs.  Instead, I suggest you to buy external hard drive as this is cheap nowadays, or you could also use a flash drive as this option is even cheaper, and use these external devices to backup only important files; Windows 7′s backup feature is more like creating a system image which mirrors your whole Windows system including all other files and folders.

For my readers, if you’re a computer expert, please help make this post even better by posting insightful comments so everyone else could benefit from such a thoughtful task.