This story happened a couple of months ago. I had a guy in my office who asked for my help. For this post, we’re going to call him Clark. It’s not his real name; I’m just watching Man of Steel while I write this. Anyway, the issue that he was having was that his monitors weren’t working. As I’m a front line I.T. Person, I’m typically the person who you’d go to for stuff like this. Luckily I was able to recognize the issue fairly quickly and help fix it. I’m not going to tell you exactly what the problem was; let’s say that I was able to see what it was instantly, and Clark felt silly asking for my help. I do what I always do when this happens. I say something to the effect of “Don’t feel bad. This kind of thing happens to me too.”
It’s true. Sometimes when I am having issues with my computer, either I don’t think about what needs to be fixed or (even worse), I OVER think what needs to be done, and I don’t see the problem staring me in the face.
1) Turn it on and off – This is something that is made fun of at an alarming rate in my experience. For any of you that have watched the I.T. Crowd, you may remember that the first scene has one of the I.T. guys answering the phone with “Hello, I.T. Department have you turned it off and on again?” The reason that it’s a bit of a cliche is that it’s an overused piece of advice. The reason it’s an overused piece of advice is because IT WORKS!!!!! There are a lot of times that updates do not install properly until the system is turned off to allow the update to integrate. There are times when you’re system has been working hard for too long and needs to shut down for a small period of time. There are also times when you could have too many programs open, and so the RAM on your computer is overtaxed. In either case, if you shut down the program you’re using, the piece of equipment, or the whole machine, it will ( in 90% of cases) fix the problem.
2) Check your connections – This is more for those who are having issues where the physical equipment isn’t working (like my buddy Clark). When you’re dealing with devices of any verity, you need to make sure that they are connected to your computer, or power as the case may be. My young son is continually telling me that we need to replace his iPad because the battery is dead, and it won’t charge. I ask him if he plugged it in, and to his credit, he did plug the iPad into the charge cord. The issue comes from the Charge cord not being plugged into a socket. If you have a piece of equipment that is not working, you need to make sure that it is connected to power AND the computer on both sides. If you are running things through a docking station, that needs to be checked as well.
3) Check your settings – I have found that there are (Certainly when working with Windows) times when you need to go into your settings to figure out what’s going wrong with your computer. Not to worry, Both Windows and macOS settings are relatively intuitive, and the settings that you would need to look for are relatively easy to find. Don’t be afraid to play around with some of the settings until you get what you need to.
BONUS TIP) Take a Deep Breath – This may seem condescending, but I promise it’s not. Sometimes when I’m trying to fix things, I go through all the things that I need to, and the problem still isn’t solved, it gets frustrating. What I find that helps me is stopping, taking a deep breath and trying again. Sometimes when I’m trying to fix a problem, I have to physically walk away from the machine for a couple of minutes. Taking a pause and trying again really does work (most of the time), so if you’re having tech issues and feeling your blood pressure rising, take a beat and see if that helps.
Trying to fix the issues on your computer yourself can be frustrating. I assure you that no matter how much tech knowledge you have, there will always be times when you get stumped by the smallest things. As it so happened, when I got back to my desk from helping out Clark, I noticed that there was a system of my own that wasn’t working properly. Suffice it to say; it took me about 5 minutes to realize that I’d accidentally clicked the wrong button earlier….an obvious mistake!
Have you ever had any small tech issues stymy you for too long?
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