Troubleshooting Windows XP Questions and Answers

1. You are a DST and today a customer brings you his computer and external hard drive and claims it does not work. His computer runs Windows XP Professional. After examining the hard drive manual, you discover that it is not Plug and Play. A disc containing the driver files is included. The computer is turned on but the external drive is not connected. What steps do you take to safely install the hard drive so it is recognized by the operating system?

Connect the external drive to the computer.

Turn on the computer.

Open Control Panel/Printers and Other Hardware

Click the Add Hardware link.

Choose Add New Hardware device from the list.

Choose Yes I have already connected the hardware option.

Choose the option to select the hardware from a list.

Choose the hard drive from the list of common hardware types.

Specify the location on the disc that contains the driver files.

1. You are a DST and today you receive a call from Matthew. Matthew's computer runs MS Windows XP Pro and he is having problems starting his computer. When Matthew starts his computer, it hangs at the logon screen. Matthew tells you the problem happened when he overwrote a system file. The file is a core system component required by the operating system. Matthew downloaded the correct version of the file from the Internet and saved it to a floppy disc. What instructions should you give Matthew to copy the correct system file to the Winnt directory.

Start the computer from a bootable Windows XP Professional CD-ROM.

Enter R when prompted to repair the Windows installation.

Copy the file you downloaded to the floppy to the Winnt directory.

Restart the computer.

1. You are a DST and today a customer calls you, "I have two Windows XP computers on my home network. One of them is connected to my ISP. The other one connects to the Internet through the first one. I configured TCP/IP filtering so only HTTP traffic comes in from the Web. Now, I cannot use Remote Desktop to connect to that computer. What can be the problem?" What should you instruct the customer to do?

The customer should ensure the filter applies to only the Internet connection. It might be the customer enabled the filter on the local area connection instead.

1. Brian and David run a marketing company. Brian and David use the same computer. The computer runs MS Windows XP Home. Brian and David have different desktop settings. The company targets both English and Spanish markets. Brian is the linguist, and his default input language is Spanish. Today, Brian and David hire Ken to join their team. Brian creates a new user account for Ken. Ken speaks and understands English only. However, when Ken logs on to the computer for the first time, he discovers his input language is Spanish. What is the most likely cause of the problem?

The language settings are configured to be applied to the default user profile. After Brian created the user account for David, Brian must have checked the "Apply all settings to the current user account and to the default user profile" option check box on the Advanced tab of the Regional and Language Options Control Panel Applet. When this option is selected, all new users will be affected by the language settings, and the currently logged-on user who configured the settings will be affected as well. All new users have profiles based on the default user profile.

1. You are on the phone with an employee who is currently away from the office. The employee configured Offline Files so she can work while her computer is disconnected from the network. The employee tells you whenever automatic synchronization occurs, many of the files are not synchronized on her computer. She ends up having older versions of most of the files. She found when she manually chose Make Available Offline from the Properties Dialog box of some of the files, those files were synchronized correctly. What might be the cause of this problem?

Insufficient disk space is allocated to the temporary cache. The amount of space used for temporary caching can be configured on the Offline Files tab in a folder's property dialog box. This setting only applies to automatic synchronization. Manual synchronization does not use this setting.

1. Russell calls you because he cannot log onto his computer. He can log on to any other computer in his department. He must be able to log on today to finish a build of the company's flagship application. The source code for the build is on a file server, but Russell cannot log on locally to that server. He must access the source code from his computer. Russell does not want to use another employee's computer because the build takes one hour to complete. All the computers in the company are members of an Active Directory. The local security policy on Russell's computer is configured with default settings. What should you do first to troubleshoot or temporarily solve the problem?

Determine if Russell is a member of the Users local group on the computer. By default, members of this group can log on to the computer. This is controlled by the local security policy defined on the computer. The local security policy has a user right named "Allow log on locally", which defines the users and groups that can interactively log on to a computer. If Russell is not a member of the Users group or another group that is a member of this group, he will not be able to log on. A user who has Administrative rights on Russell's computer might have removed him from the required local group.

1. Derik is having problems accessing his DVD-ROM and CD-ROM drives. This problem happened after he opened an email attachment. His computer runs MS Windows XP Pro. You ask Derik to ensure his drivers are the correct versions. However, he does not know how to do that. What should you tell Derik to do that will allow you to determine whether correct versions of the drivers are installed?

Run the DRIVERQUERY command-line tool, specifying a text file as a parameter. Email the text file to you. This tool can either display output to the console or to a command-delimited text file. Derick should specify a text file as a parameter, and email the file to you for examination.

1. You are called to a customer's home to troubleshoot access to http://www.torranzo.com/ from the customer's computer, which is running Windows XP Home. All of the customer's friends can access the Web site. The customer tells you a friend configured the computer to allow faster Internet response time. The problem began afterwards. What actions should you perform to diagnose the problem?

Use Internet Explorer to open the IP address of the website. This allows you to determine whether the problem is related to network connectivity or name resolution.

If the IP address can be accessed, the problem is related to name resolution. You should use NSLOOKUP http://www.torranzo.com/. This allows you to determine whether http://www.torranzo.com/ is registered in DNS (Domain Name System). If the resource is properly registered in DNS, the Hosts file on the customer's computer might be configured incorrectly. The computer checks its local Hosts file before contacting DNS for name resolution.

1. You need to install Windows XP Service Pack 2 on five computers. You decide the easiest way to install the service pack is to walk to each of the computers and manually launch the installation. However, you would like the installation to proceed without requiring any input from you. Which commands could you use to install Windows XP Service Pack2 without prompting the user?

Xpxp2.exe/U (shows the progress on the screen)

Xpxp2.exe/Q (displays no information to the user at all)

1. You receive a call from a customer who is trying to remotely monitor a computer in another office. Both the customer's computer and the remote computer runs XP Pro and are part of the same workgroup. The customer is trying to use the Performance Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in to monitor the computer. However, when he specifies the remote computer in the Add Counters dialog box, he is presented with the following error message: Unable to connect to machine. What should you tell the customer?

Ensure you are a member of the Performance Log Users group on the remote computer. To open the Performance MMC snap-in to use remote monitoring, you must use an account that is a member of the Performance Log Users group. This group exists solely to permit remote monitoring.

For detailed instructions on How to Configure Windows Firewall in Windows XP Service Pack 2 to allow remote administration tools:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/840634

1. Mike was recently hired for a temporary assignment while Samantha, the administrative assistant, is on an extended sick leave. Mike uses Samantha's computer, which runs MS Windows XP Pro on an NTFS partition. The firm bills its client each month. Samanta uses a MS Excel document to organize billings. She backs up the document on the first of every month. She then sets read-only attributes on the document to ensure she doesn't accidentally overwrite the document. The day before Samantha went on leave, she encrypted the document using EFS (Encrypting File System). Mike tries to open and read the document, but is denied access. What should Mike do to successfully read the document?

Obtain a copy of the file from a backup made before the file was encrypted. Because the file is changed only on the first day of the month, the latest backup contains the most recent copy of the document.

1. Susan calls you because she is having problems running an application that was installed on her computer by another user. Her computer runs MS Windows XP Pro. When Susan run the application, she receives an error message indicating she must have administrative privileges to run the application. All users in the company have two user accounts, a local computer administrative account and a non-administrative domain account. Susan is currently logged on the computer using her domain account. You instruct Susan to use the Run As command to run the application. However, the Run As command fails. She remembers being able to use the Run As command before with another application. What is the most likely cause of this problem?

The Secondary Logon service is disabled. This service is required for the Run As command to function. The service's startup type should be set to Automatic.

1. Today you receive a call from a customer, "I am trying to allow the computers in my two offices to talk to each other. Someone told me I have to modify a Hosts file. Where can I find the Hosts file?" Where should the customer look for this file?

In the Systemroot%systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc directory on each computer. Both the Hosts and Lmhosts files are located in the Systemroot%systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc directory on each computer. Hosts files perform fully qualified domain name (FQDN) resolution, while Lmhosts files perform NETBIOS name resolution. Depending on the type of name resolution needed, one of these files must be configured on every computer that must participate in name resolution.