Troubleshooting PC Problems
Troubleshooting Problems
As an IT technician, troubleshooting PC problems will be one of your core job responsibilities. Troubleshooting is both art and science and you can learn how to do it. Troubleshooting also happens to be why many of us sign up for jobs in IT and enjoy the day to day – troubleshooting and diagnosing problems excites us!
Essential Tools for Troubleshooting
There are many tools you can use to work on PCs, but there are two essential tools you should bring when troubleshooting a problem – pen & paper and an ESD strap. You will learn in the Safety section how crucial an ESD strap is, but it can mean the difference between a fixable computer and a dead piece of junk.
Pen & paper are crucial to troubleshooting so you can write things down you will need to remember later – such as error codes, software settings, or a web address. You don’t want to have to bother every customer you visit for a pen and paper so you can write things down. You also do not want to rely on your memory for an error code. A typically Microsoft error code might read: 0x878225xCCC00 LOAD SICILY FAILED. Will you remember that on the trip back to the office or upstairs to your machine?
Essentially, there are three reasons why you will be called to troubleshoot a PC problem:
1. User error – also known as training issue – the user is trying to do something he or she does not understand or is doing incorrectly and thinks the computer is “broken.”
2. Recent changes to software or hardware.
3. Actual computer hardware failure.
The third reason is actually a much smaller percentage of the problems you will face than the first two. In troubleshooting, you need to determine first if the problem is just user error or if something changed on the user’s computer.
A change on the computer could be an intentional change (I installed this great piece of software off the Internet which downloads cute pictures of kittens, oh and also broken my accounting application) or an unattended change (Windows update installed a security fix which broke the accounting application).
In a small percentage of service calls, you will be lucky enough to have an actual piece of broken hardware to fix!
To figure out what kind of event happened to cause the service call, you will need to ask the user several questions.
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