Repairing/Rebuilding A Computer's WMI

[Vince]

Ok, so my dad is a Half-Life 2 Deathmatch junkie. Plays it all the time. Lately, he's been getting a shader-something or other .dll file that is giving him an error. Steam says that this fix (http://windowsxp.mvps.org/repairwmi.htm) corrects the problem in 100% of all reported cases. My dad is completely computer illiterate (or really close to it), so he's enlisted my help.

This seems like a bit technical for a quick fix, and the how-to is a little less idiot-proof than I'd expect for a general computer gaming population. I can handle doing all the steps there fine, I just want to make sure I don't somehow goof and break my dad's computer. I'm one of those guys who knows that .dll stands for dynamic link library, but I have no idea what that really means. I can get around a computer ok, but I'm really not all that savvy. Does anyone here have any experience doing things like this, and is there anything I should watch out for while doing it?

[cartman]

Those steps do appear pretty straight-forward. As long as you double-check the typing before hitting enter each time, it should take care of the problem. A DLL is basically a file that has code that many different programs access. Instead of repeating the code everytime in several different programs, the programs reference a DLL to get the code they need.