Introduction

Blue screens, locked-up systems, cryptic error messages, missing operating system files, dead keyboards and mice, unresponsive devices all in a day's work for many PC troubleshooters.

When Windows crashes, it's easy to believe that the operating system itself is to blame. Indeed, Windows probably has untold vulnerabilities that allow the core of the operating system to be blown up to the point of having to restart, but the crashes and errors are usually caused by a misbehaving application, driver, bad memory, faulty disk, or mixed-up piece of hardware.

As user-friendly as Windows XP is supposed to be, it still presents and logs many error conditions using cryptic numeric codes, or text that sometimes defies the rules of grammar, and provides no help in arriving at a solution. This chapter is full of solutions to those mysterious error codes and how to decipher the ones that are too numerous to list.