Common PC Errors and How You Can Fix Them

Common PC Errors and How You Can Fix Them

PC errors are not unknown to computer users. These errors may occur due to several reasons and cause unnecessary frustrations and troubles. However, if you know your way around them, you may be able to recover from these problems yourself and save yourself a lot of trouble.

To help you understand more about computer problems, we are going to cover a couple of common PC errors & problems and the methods that you may use to resolve them.

Error Message: “Error 1304. Error writing to the file File_name and location. Verify that you have access to that directory.”

This error message may appear on your computer during the installation of Microsoft Office 2000, Microsoft Office XP, or Microsoft Works suit. This error usually occurs if the CD/DVD from which you are performing the installation is dirty or the CD/DVD drive on your computer is not configured correctly. You may also encounter the error due to damaged or outdated Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) installation.

As problems with the CD/DVD disk or drive are the main cause of this error message, we first need to check them for problems. For instance, you must ensure that your CD/DVD is disk is not dirty or scratched. If it is, try cleaning the disk or try to get hold of another disk to perform the installation. Also, try to check the disk in another CD/DVD drive. If your disk works in another drive, then the drive on your computer is quite likely to have problems. You may try to update the drivers of this drive, or get it checked for physical problems. At times, you may have duplicate drives installed on the PC. The existence of these duplicate drives may also generate error 1304. If this happens, you must uninstall all drives using the Device Manager, and restart your PC. Because CD/DVD drives are usually Plug and Play, your drive should install automatically when the PC restarts. If you think the error is due to damaged or outdated MDAC, you must download and install the latest MDAC from the Microsoft MSDN Web site. If nothing works, and if you have access to a network, try to perform the installation from another location over the network.

Problem: During Windows update, rtvscan.exe causes high CPU usage with the svchost.exe file.

The rtvscan.exe file is a Norton Antivirus file. You usually encounter high CPU usage problems when Norton is trying to scan the C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution for malware infections. In this folder, the Windows Update utility stores several update files in the form of zips and nested zips, so the rtvscan.exe may take a long time to scan it, and thus, cause high CPU usage problems.

The best way to resolve this problem is to customize your Norton scan to exclude the C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution from virus scanning processes.

Several PC errors are also known to occur due to problems within the Windows registry. This usually happens, when over time, the registry bloats up because it gets filled up with a large amount of unwanted data comprising incorrect, outdated, and redundant entries. To prevent this situation and to keep your registry optimized and compact, you must scan and clean it on a regular basis. It is recommended that you use a reliable registry cleaner tool to perform these tasks easily and efficiently.