When something goes wrong with your computer’s hardware, you may not want to fix it right away. Hardware problems can be expensive, and unfortunately, if you want to use your PC, then you’re going to have to find a way around them.
Today, we’re going to show you how to fix hardware problems using free, easy-to-use software. Obviously, software can’t be used to solve all your hardware problems, but it does an excellent job of fixing all of the following issues:
A broken power button on your monitor
On some monitors, the buttons along the bottom that allow you to power down and adjust visual settings are very flimsy. Over time, they can degrade to a point where they fall off, or where you need to use tape just to hold them in place. If you can’t turn your monitor off, then you can use MonitorOff to do it for you. Once installed, you can simply move your mouse around or press any key to turn it back on. Cool!
Broken optical tray drive
The optical drive tends to be another flimsy part on many PCs. When it’s open, it’s easy for you (or a pet) to bump against it. This might not snap the drive but it could mess up the internal connections of your PC, which means that the button on the outside of your optical drive will refuse to work. If this happened to your PC, you can use a program called Tray 2.5 to open the drive for you. It even supports up to 4 different optical drives.
Broken keyboard
Many PC owners have suffered from a broken keyboard. Most often, this occurs because you spilled liquid on it. However, keyboards can break down for any number of reasons. If your keys are unresponsive or moody, a virtual keyboard can help you out. It displays a keyboard on screen that you can click on to choose which keys to press. Incidentally, virtual keyboards can also protect you against keylogging viruses, and many antivirus scanners will include virtual keyboards in their suite of tools.
Keyboard indicator lights are broken
This is an obscure PC problem, but a problem nonetheless. If the indicator lights on your keyboard – like the caps lock and num lock keys – are broken, then this utility will display an on-screen bubble for you instead. This may seem like a small fix, but it ends up being surprisingly useful, particularly if you work with a lot of statistical data on your PC.
Your mouse is broken
If your mouse breaks down, then you may think all hope is lost for your PC. However, if you have an old joystick or gamepad lying around, then a program like J-Mouse can turn it into an easy-to-use mouse. Of course, if your mouse doesn’t work, then simply navigating to that website might be a problem, in which case you may need to download it on another PC first.