If something went wrong with your computer what would you do? Look up the manufacturer's website, ask a question on a forum, or perhaps download a user guide? All these things involve using the internet, so if you can't get online it could leave you a bit stuck. In this situation, having a second computer can save you so much hassle.

Recently my internet connection stopped working on my desktop PC. Every time I went to a page it would just time out and give me an error message ?The Page Could Not be Found?. I was about to ring my internet provider and complain that they were not providing a good service. Before I rang them, I thought I would quickly double check the connection on my laptop, and it was working perfectly. This saved me a lot of wasted time and energy ? just imagine how embarrassing that could have turned out.

The fact that the laptop worked meant that it must have been a problem with the computer. In the end it was my web browser that had become corrupted. I reinstalled it and the problem went away. This technique is the best way I know to identify faulty components, or bad software.

A computer has so many components that could be causing the problem. It is often impossible to identify the culprit just from the symptoms alone. Computer repair shops charge a small fortune to repair computer faults, but for the most part what they do is really simple. From the symptoms they get a rough idea of what might be the problematic components. Then they just swap out a suspect component and see if the problem goes away. With the exception of the CPU and motherboard, all the components are really easy to replace. Repairs done in this way shouldn't take more than 30-60 minutes. For this reason a second computer can come in really handy because you can use this technique to swap components from one machine to the other.