Category Archives: Windows

W8 video

Windows 8 takes a bit of getting used to — there are lots of things that aren’t obvious unless you’ve been shown them.  Luckily, Scott Hanselman has put together an excellent introductory video that makes things much clearer. It’s available on his website.

chkdsk hangs — but not from Vista

I usually run chkdsk from a bootable CD such as Hiren’s, but today I had a Vista machine with a disk fault, and chkdsk from the CD kept hanging at 1% of phase 4: it got completely stuck, and I had to force the computer to power off.

I thought that the disk must be completely borked, but in fact it did boot into Windows — but very slowly.  And when I set Vista’s chkdsk to run on restart, it worked perfectly: it just found bad sectors in one file.

So, the moral is: don’t dismiss the idea of running chkdsk from the faulty disk, even with Vista.