Subtitles of the Movie

Okay, so you've installed an Expansion card, what can possibly go wrong, right? Well, as it turns out, as you well know, if you stick it into your computer ah it can have ah some irritating problems possibly. The number one tool for troubleshooting expansion card issues is the device manager and I'll go out there and show you the device manager in just a second, but let's talk about what we're going to look for. Any time you see a black exclamation point with a yellow background this indicates that that device is in a problem state, something's wrong and needs to be corrected. Notice that if it's in a problem state it does not mean that it's not functioning. Sometimes it's functioning partially, sometimes it's functioning, sometimes it's reporting back a problem, it can be all kinds of weird stuff, but if you see a black exclamation point probably the thing you need to do is update the device drivers or reinstall the device, and you know how things are, it's the old reboot thing. When something's just not working, reboot the computer and that can fix it. Now, keep in mind in a, in a lot of corporate environments, they simply will not work. You can't just reboot the server just because ah, some card's not working. So, one thing you might want to do is remove the card, stick it back in, reload the device drivers and so forth. So, black exclamation point on a yellow field tells you, you have a problem. A red X tells you that device is disabled; I'll show you that one in just a few minutes, ah, simply means the device is disabled, not working, but it is using resources, kind of interesting. A blue I on a white field on the device resource ah indicates that the use automatic settings feature was not selected and the resource was manually selected. That's just letting you know that this was a manually selected resource, and a blue I doesn't mean anything's necessarily wrong. So, the main thing we want to watch for is the red X, ah and the black exclamation point are the two things you really want to watch for. So, ah let's go take a look at ah the device manager and I'll show you the easy way to get there. And you'll notice here that I've gone out to my desktop and find My Computer. Now this can't be a shortcut to My Computer, but find the My Computer icon, it's not there you can get it in the Start menu. Right click it, choose Properties, then you'll see the hardware tab, then you will see device manager. Now, once we're in device manager, let me make it a little larger. You'll notice it shows you all the installed devices on your computer and then, for example, if I extend Network Adapters, it will show me the adapters. Now these ah, red I, the red X's and the blue icons and the black icons and the yellow backgrounds and stuff will show up right beside these and I'll show you one. Let's say the modem, notice I've got a modem in this box, and if I right click the device I can update the driver, it will start a wizard to update the driver. I can disable it or uninstall it. If I disable it it's going to stop functioning, I'm not using the modem right now anyway, so I want to disable this thing and let you see what it looks like. Notice the red X. This is telling me that that is disabled and you will see these icons in front of each one of these resources over the little icon here when and if you have an issue. Now with this one all I have to do is right click and enable the resource and it will eventually pop back. Now there's something else I'm going to show you and it's a trick. What if I put a card or a device in my computer but for some reason it didn't find it, it didn't see it. I can always come up here and right click on the computer and say scan for hardware changes, and that quick it will scan and see if it detects anything else. And so that's a cool way of troubleshooting some things and for example, I can right click here and update the driver and notice this will tell me, does it want to do a Windows update to search for, and I can say, no, not this time, and step through. Do I have it on installation CD or floppy disk, or if I've downloaded it from the Internet I can choose this and begin to just browse down to there it is and update any of my device drivers. And then, of course, I can uninstall, reinstall, here again I can scan for hardware changes. Notice if I click on something, right click, and choose Properties I can start to do some diagnostics on it and in this instance I can query the modem to see if it's working. I can get to some advanced port settings and so forth, you can get to a lot of different things out here; driver details, I can see what I've got loaded out there, which ones, notice the file version. So a lot of things I can see from the device manager so use this as your primary troubleshooting tool for your expansion bus type devices, and you can also see it's a great place to look for other problems as well.