See Also
© 2006 David R. Snow. All rights reserved.
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Clean Boot Troubleshooting
Clean boot troubleshooting (also called safe mode troubleshooting) is a fundamental means of diagnosing errors on Windows systems. First you determine if the problem disappears when booted into safe mode. If so, use msconfig to turn off all startup items and see if the problem is still gone. If these two criteria are met, the problem can be localized using the clean boot method. If not, other techniques must be resorted to. Once it has been determined that clean boot can be used, msconfig is used to determine in which group of items the problem lies, and then finally to determine the exact item which is causing the problem. In practice, a good many of the problems that occur on Windows computers can be found in this way, common exceptions being hardware, driver and registry problems, corrupted files, problems that prevent the computer from even booting to safe mode, and many networking and browsing issues, and startup issues related to malware i.e. spyware and viruses. WinMaven has been developed to cover the latter two areas, as well as increase the range of startup issues that can be diagnosed.
