You have just been struck by the Blue Screen of Death. Anyone who uses Mcft Windows will be familiar with this. What can you do? More importantly, how can you prevent it happening?

5 Fatal OE exceptions and VXD errors

Fatal OE exception errors and VXD errors are often caused by video card problems.

These can often be resolved easily by reducing the resolution of the video display. Go to

* Start-Settings-Control Panel-Display-Settings

Here you should slide the screen area bar to the left. Take a look at the colour settings on the left of that window. For most desktops, high colour 16-bit depth is adequate.

If the screen freezes or you experience system lockups it might be due to the video card. Make sure it does not have a hardware conflict. Go to

* Start-Settings-Control Panel-System-Device Manager

Here, select the + beside Display Adapter. A line of text describing your video card should appear. Select it (make it blue) and press properties. Then select Resources and select each line in the window. Look for a message that says No Conflicts.

If you have video card hardware conflict, you will see it here. Be careful at this point and make a note of everything you do in case you make things worse.

The way to resolve a hardware conflict is to uncheck the Use Automatic Settings box and hit the Change Settings button. You are searching for a setting that will display a No Conflicts message.

Another useful way to resolve video problems is to go to

* Start-Settings-Control Panel-System-Performance-Graphics

Here you should move the Hardware Acceleration slider to the left. As ever, the most common cause of problems relating to graphics cards is old or faulty drivers (a driver is a small piece of software used by a computer to communicate with a device).

Look up your video card’s manufacturer on the internet and search for the most recent drivers for it.

6 Viruses

Often the first sign of a virus infection is instability. Some viruses erase the boot sector of a hard drive, making it impossible to start. This is why it is a good idea to create a Windows start-up disk. Go to

* Start-Settings-Control Panel-Add/Remove Programs

Here, look for the Start Up Disk tab. Virus protection requires constant vigilance.

A virus scanner requires a list of virus signatures in order to be able to identify viruses. These signatures are stored in a DAT file. DAT files should be updated weekly from the website of your antivirus software manufacturer.

An excellent antivirus programme is McAfee VirusScan by Network Associates ( www.nai.com). Another is Norton AntiVirus 2000, made by Symantec ( www.symantec.com).

Troubleshooting and Maintaining Your PC All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies (For Dummies (Computers))

Video editors and motion-graphics artists have been poorly served by laptops, with even the most expensive notebook components proving inadequate for heavy renders or editing. Canadian manufacturer Eurocom has a cunning solution:  shoehorn desktop components into a laptop chasis. The results is the beefy D900C Phantom-X, with a desktop processor and the option ( as tested) of dual SLI graphic cards.

The dual NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX graphics cards with 512mb of onboard RAM support the various shader architectures , as well as 64 bit processing, making the Phantom as adept at 3D rendering and onboard graphical processing as a full desktop PC.

The Phantom whupped even Apple’s top-line Max Pro in the benchmark stakes, recording some starling Cinebench results. Video-editing was similarly slick, handling full-definition HD files like no other laptop we’ve encountered.

But the downside of such power is the laptop’s size, weight and battery life. The 17-inch glossy screen dilutes and reflects colours-not a good sign for creative work. While it’s a great screen in other respects, anyone working in a colour-critical environment will find it irksome.

More pressing still is the Phantom’s woeful battery life. We managed to run it for a measly 52 minutes unplugged . But at almost 7kg, the laptop’s probability is already diminished , so it’s unlikely to ever be far from an energy source. The noise of four fans to cool it also makes sound-editing problematic to say the least.