Scandisk
Welcome to the first week of “Double Click”! You may wonder what will be talked about here – that will be totally up to you. Each week I will select one of the many questions sent to me about how to do things with your computer. Write me and ask things like, “What is that whirring sound?”, “How do I use a search engine?”, “I don’t have email, what does it do, how much does it cost?”, “How do I make a numbered list in Word?” I will answer the more useful and most prevalent questions that you send and try to make you grin along the way.
You may want to know if I am a big city computer geek…no I am a Shenandoah Valley geek. This is where you may want to ask, “Does Ron know this stuff or did he just read one of those books for ‘computer illiterates’?” Well I have read a couple of those books. However, I am a computer trainer, software instructor, and a web site designer. I am also a certified Microsoft Office Specialist – Master Instructor (that means I teach MS applications, MS got money from me to take their tests and an annual fee to use the title).
OK . . . finally, our first reader question. Yes, I made this one up since you have not written me yet. Incidentally the majority of situations we look at will deal with Windows® Operating Systems, like Windows ’98 since that is the most poplar operating system at this time.
Our first question goes something like this, “When I start my computer I get a blue screen with white letters, which is titled Microsoft ScanDisk, it says, ‘Because Windows was not properly shut down one or more of your disk drives may have errors on it. To avoid seeing this message again, always shut down your computer by selecting Shut Down from the Start menu.’ I didn’t do anything Ron the computer made this up! Why does it say this?”
First off relax because most likely your drive(s) do not have any errors on them, but the system wants to warn you that it could and then it automatically volunteers to check for errors. Yes watch the little white bar at the bottom and it shows how fast the checking goes. Many experienced “users” just select the EXIT button by pressing the ENTER key and ignore ScanDisk, but you may want to check. It hardly ever finds errors.
This message does come from your system being shut down in an improper manner, but not always due to your error, but the computer’s error. Think about it, have you ever had your computer just “lock-up” on you and quit working? No buttons, no mouse, no keyboard control, nothing! Yes I know it has happened to you, along with every other user in the world and many times too.
When you finally get tired of waiting for your computer to fix itself as it hangs for 30 minutes so, you press the off button on your system (the usually white box sitting on the floor). Some of the more desperate of you unplug your system from the wall. Either of these actions will shut down your computer but you did not use the proper sequence of START/SHUT DOWN. So ScanDisk activates when you start your computer the next time.
Can there be errors on your hard drive? I said earlier that most likely there are none, but yes there can be. If you to have been typing a letter, playing a game, using the internet, reading email, or running any other application at the time everything locked up you could have errors. The letter might not have been saved and you may not be able to find it later, the game could have a corrupt file that stops it from working properly, you could possibly have a problem on the internet, conceivably an email is missing, or whatever. Please notice the underlined words in this paragraph, these are the important ones. Errors of this type are rare and should not create major problems.
