Franske CNT-2300 Maintenance and Troubleshooting Lab

In this lab students, working in partners or small groups, will further explore system maintenance and troubleshooting skills and utilities.

• In your lab notebook list at least two aspects of regular hardware maintenance.
• In your lab notebook list at least four aspects of regular software maintenance.
• In your lab notebook list the steps you would go through to begin troubleshooting a customer's PC.
• Locate the built in Windows disk defragmentation program and run it
  • Analyze your primary hard drive and record in your lab notebook the level of drive fragmentation you found.
• Explore the "System Information" tool which comes with Windows and describe, in your lab notebook, at least two ways this tool could be useful.
• Open a command line window on your system (Start -> Run -> cmd)
  • Run the chkdsk program from the command line using the command "chkdsk /?"
  • Record in your lab notebook the command you would use to run a chkdsk scan on the C drive and to run a chkdsk repair on the C drive (fix errors found if possible)
  • Describe in your lab notebook at least two of the other options for running chkdsk and what those options would do.
  • Run a chkdsk to fix errors on your C drive. You are asked to schedule this operation and run it the next time the system boots. Why is this?
  • Reboot your computer and observe the chkdsk operation
• Right click on "My Computer" and then click on "Management" to bring up the "Computer Management" interface
  • Explore the computer management interface, in particular the "Disk Management" utility and describe some of the things you can do with this utility
  • Close the computer management interface
• Open the "Device Manager" through the control panel (Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager)
  • Explore the various devices attached to your computer, clicking the "+" sign next to categories to expand them.
  • Explore the details of at least 3 devices on your computer by double clicking on the devices one at a time
  • Record in your lab notebook some of the information and options shown in the detailed device information window for one or more of these devices.
  • Close the device manager and system properties windows.
• On your Windows XP lab computer launch the Event Viewer (Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer)
  • Review the events recorded on your system and describe in your lab notebook the kind of events recorded on your computer including information, warnings and errors.
  • Explore the variety of features in the event viewer including exporting the log for viewing on another computer, filtering and sorting the event list in different ways and creating new custom log views

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