Unfortunately, the solutions are different depending on which OS you are running: XP, Vista or Windows 7. I’ll try to list out as many fixes for this problem as I can and which OS it applies too.

Reinstall Drivers

A lot of times, you might see a message like this in Device Manager about your CD/DVD drive:

Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)

You can reinstall the drivers for the CD/DVD drive by going to Start, Control Panel, System and Security, System and then clicking on Device Manager.

Expand CD/DVD-ROM Drives, then right-click on the device and click Uninstall. Restart the computer and Windows should auto-detect the drive and reinstall the drivers for you.

If your hardware is not even showing up in the Device Manager, then you may actually have a hardware problem, such as a faulty connection or a dead drive. It’s worth checking this option out if the computer is old.

Upper Filters/Lower Filters Problem

If your Windows XP or Windows Vista computer is not able to recognize the CD/DVD drive, then you might have a classic problem that will probably not show up on any computer that has the most recent Windows updates applied to it.

You have to edit two registry entries to fix the problem in Windows XP and Vista. You can either do it manually or you can download the fix from Microsoft here:

http://support.microsoft.com/mats/cd_dvd_drive_problems/en-us

If you want to do it manually, go to regedit and navigate to this entry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

In the right pane, you should see Upper Filters and Lower Filters. Delete both of these and then restart the computer.

Run Hardware and Devices Troubleshooter

If you are having the issue on Windows 7, then you can try to run the Hardware and Devices Troubleshooter. This will automatically diagnose and try to remedy the problem.

Note that this will probably only work if you can see the CD/DVD drive in the BIOS and in Device Manager, but just not anywhere else in Windows. If you don’t see it in those two places, you got a hardware or connection problem.

You can run the troubleshooter by going to Start, Control Panel and then searching for troubleshooter in the search box. Click on Troubleshooting. Finally, under Hardware and Sound, click Configure a device.

Click Next and Windows will detect problems and try to fix them automatically.

System Restore

If you’re still having issues and your drive was showing up earlier, but now it’s gone, you can try to perform a system restore to a time when the drive was working properly.

Sometimes a new piece of software is installed that can corrupt your system so that it no longer recognizes your CD/DVD drive.

If that doesn’t work, try plugging the drive into another computer and see if it shows up there. You can quickly determine whether it’s a problem with the hardware or with the Windows operating system. Good luck!

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Sometimes it’s slow, sometimes flash crashes, sometimes webpages don’t display properly, etc! In this article, I’m going to try and list out the different issues I’ve run into with IE 9 including the ones mentioned above.

If you’ve run into a different sort of problem with IE 9 that I haven’t listed here, feel free to post a comment and I’ll get back to you.

Webpage Not Displaying Correctly

If you are viewing a webpage and something is not looking correct, for example, the layout or colors, etc, you can try a few things in IE 9 to resolve the issue.

The first thing is to try Compatibility View. You can do that by clicking the little torn paper icon in the address bar.

That tends to fix most display issues in IE 9, but if it doesn’t, you can try two other options: turning off Tracking Protection and turning off Hardware Acceleration.

Tracking Protection is basically InPrivate Browsing, that used to be in IE 8. They just changed the name. In order to turn it off for a website, you have to click on the Filter icon that will appear in the address bar.

That will show any filtered content, which is usually scripts, etc that run on the website. Note that if you are having issues on sites that run Flash, you can also try to turn off ActiveX Filtering as that may be blocking the Flash from loading properly.

To turn off Hardware Acceleration in IE 9, click on the Tools button, which is the gear icon and click on Internet Options.

Go to the Advanced tab and check the Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering box.

IE 9 Crashes a Lot

If you installed IE 9 and you are getting message like

“Internet Explorer has stopped working”

then you might have some corrupt files or other serious issues going. The best thing to try here is to uninstall IE 9 and re-install it.

You can also try to re-register the IE 9 dlls. Go to the command prompt and type the following and press Enter after each line:

regsvr32 softpub.dll

regsvr32 wintrust.dll

regsvr32 initpki.dll

regsvr32 dssenh.dll

regsvr32 rsaenh.dll

regsvr32 gpkcsp.dll

regsvr32 sccbase.dll

regsvr32 slbcsp.dll

regsvr32 cryptdlg.dll

If that doesn’t do anything, you can try two other things: start with no add-ons and reset Internet Explorer settings.

You can quickly check whether it’s an add-on problem by clicking on Start and typing in:

iexplorer.exe –extoff

If the issue goes away, you know it’s an add-on. You can then go to IE 9, click on the Tool icon, and choose Manage Add-ons. Go ahead and disable the add-ons and then restart to see which one is causing the issue.

To reset Internet Explorer settings, go to Tools, Internet Options and then Advanced tab. Scroll down and under Reset Internet Explorer, click the Reset button. Then click it one more time. After it’s done, restart IE.

If you’re having other issues with IE 9 and you’ve tried all the stuff above, it could be a problem with some third-party software such as anti-virus or something else.

In those cases, it’s best to try and create a new user account and then see how IE 9 behaves. Sometimes with a new user account, things start working much better. If this is the case, something is messed up with your current profile.

Hopefully, that helps with some of the main issues people have had with IE 9. If you have questions, post a comment and I’ll try to help!

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One cause is a lack of sufficient free space on your hard drive to save the System Restore files. To remedy this problem, make sure you have at least 300 MB of free space on your hard drive (50 MB if your hard drive is smaller than 300 MB and you’re running Windows 7).

Another cause of missing restore points is a problem with the task scheduler. Before you start troubleshooting this issue, click the Start button, then type Services.msc in the Start Search box. Check to make sure that Volume Shadow Services is running.

Run Task Scheduler. Click the Start button, then type Task Scheduler and press Enter. Expand the Task Scheduler Library, then select Microsoft, Windows and SystemRestore.  In the top pane click the entry named SR.  In the bottom pane, click the History tab to see any System Restore tasks, warnings and errors that have been recorded.

Right click the SR file, select Properties and then click the Triggers tab. Click a trigger, then click Edit. Change the trigger so that it creates a restore point automatically when you want it to be created. For example, you could edit the trigger set for 12:00 am daily to another time of day when the computer will be running.

Click the Conditions tab. Uncheck the check box beside Start the task only if the computer is idle for. Also uncheck the box beside Start the task only if the computer is on AC power.

Another way to fix problems with missing System Restore Points is by using the System File Checker. Click the Start button, then type cmd in the start search box. Right-click cmd.exe and click Run as Administrator. Type sfc/scannow at the command prompt. Allow the System File Checker to complete the scan and repair process.

You may receive a message that Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them. If this occurs, type findstr /c:”[SR]” %windir%\logs\cbs\cbs.log >sfcdetails.txt at the command prompt and press Enter.

Navigate to your windows/system32 folder and open sfcdetails.txt in Notepad. Click Edit and Find, then type cannot repair member file to see the problems that the System File Checker was unable to repair.

You can also fix this problem by turning System Restore off, then turning it back on again. Learn how to disable and enable System Restore in Windows Vista and in Windows 7.

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A bad BHO or “browser hijacker” may change your Internet Explorer home page or your default search engine, add bad links to your desktop or Favorites folder, track your Internet browsing and install unwanted toolbars. If a malicious BHO is installed on your computer, it can seem almost impossible to remove.

Since BHOs can only run in Internet Explorer, you can easily prevent them from running by switching browsers. Other web browsers that are free, fast and safe include Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. However, if you intend to continue using Internet Explorer, you will have to take steps to remove malicious BHOs from your computer’s system.

If a BHO is harmless but you don’t want it installed, you can remove it in Internet Options. Start Internet Explorer and click Tools and Internet Options. Click the Programs tab, then click Manage Add-Ons. Browse the list to find BHOs that are currently installed. Right-click the entry, then select Disable.

If a BHO is malicious, one of the simplest and fastest way to remove it is with SpyBHORemover. This free software program can quickly detect and remove malicious BHOs from your computer system.

When SpyBHORemover scans your system, it color codes BHOs to indicate whether they’re safe or not. Benign BHOs appear in green. Unknown BHOs appear in yellow. Suspicious BHOs are marked by orange, and dangerous BHOs are marked in red.

You can easily find more information about a BHO by right-clicking it entry and selecting Check for Threats Online. Then select VirusTotal, ThreatExpert or ProcessLibrary to learn more about the file name.

To see the file location, click View in Explorer. View the BHO’s registry entry by clicking Jump to Registry. Uninstall the item by clicking Remove BHO. To see the file name and other information, click File Properties. Grayed out items in this context menu are disabled.

If you trust the program that installed the BHO, there’s no need to remove it, even if it’s marked yellow or orange. However, if you can’t find any information about the file, if it’s regarded as a threat or you didn’t choose to install it, your best option is to remove the BHO.

For even more tips, read How to remove spyware using HijackThis.

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For example, if you have previously used a flash drive with a Mac computer, and formatted the drive to OS X Extended, and now reformatted the USB flash drive back to Windows FAT32, sometimes it will display incorrectly. Although this is not always the case, reformatting the USB flash drive from the original formatting is the most likely culprit.

Formatting, whether it be a hard drive, flash drive, etc., is never a fun process. However, there is one app that makes restoring your USB flash drive to full capacity easier than ever.

Before getting started, do this quick check. Open the start menu, right click on Computer, and select Manage from the drop down menu. This should open up the Windows Computer Management pane. Click the listing Disk Management, located along the left side of the window.

Assuming that you have your flash drive plugged into an available USB port on your computer, you should see it in the main section of the Computer Management window. Go ahead and click to select, and details should show up below about your USB flash drive. For example, in the screenshot below, you can see that the USB flash drive is showing up as Disk 1 – USB Drive (E:).

Now, understand that this flash drive is showing up correctly. It has already been brought back to full capacity. Your USB drive however, may display as two partitions, or something similar. The first partition, which Windows recognizes, may say something like 500MB. The second partition, which Windows does not recognize, may say something like 7 GB. That is why the flash drive is not showing full capacity.

The problem is, Window’s built-in USB formatting capabilities (right-click on your flash drive, select format), are a little to basic and do not always pick up on the full capacity of a hard drive that has been reformatted several times. Thus, you need to do a full USB drive wipe, and get the drive cleaned up, and partitioned as one whole, so that Windows recognizes the full capacity. From there, you can repartition it, if you so choose.

To do this, head on over to Pen Drive Apps and look for an app called Boot-It. Boot-it is a cool, lightweight application developed by USB flash drive manufacturer Lexar. Now, this is not guaranteed to work on all flash drives, given that it’s a Lexar utility. However, chances are high that it will work.

For example, I tested this on a cheap Patriot Memory USB drive and it worked like a charm. Once downloaded, you should not have to install Boot-It. Simply click the icon and it should launch.

Make sure that your USB flash drive is inserted into an available USB port on your PC. Also, make sure that you have anything backed up, as this utility will completely destroy everything on the drive, and restore full capacity. After you are good to go, assure that the correct device is selected in the Boot-it devices window. In the below screenshot, the device is E:.

Click the Format button, click Yes on the next screen, and say goodbye to any or all data on the flash drive. Please note, Boot-it will display a prompt, telling you that format will continue after the USB drive is reinserted.

When you see this screen, unplug your USB flash drive from the computer, wait a couple of seconds, and plug back in. From there, Boot-it should completely reformat your USB drive back to factory settings. Thus, Windows will now detect the USB drive as full capacity!

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