Intro to Your Tech: Troubleshooting

Computers are important for just about everything nowadays, but they can be difficult to deal with when they start to act up. If hardware doesn’t connect to a network, or if you have software that fails to respond when you click on it, you’ll likely need assistance to figure out what the cause is. On occasion, however, the issue might be something that a simple troubleshooting procedure can help you resolve. We’ll help you determine whether or not a situation is dire enough to involve professionals, as well as when it’s tame enough that you can resolve it on your own.

Troubleshooting
If something seems off, it’s natural for you to try and fix it, but this approach often means making the problem worse on accident. The issue in this is that you don’t actually know what’s causing the problem, so ultimately you’re just making a guess rather than actually finding the solution. Troubleshooting is designed to eliminate possible issues to determine what’s giving you trouble. After all, if you know what the problem is, you can address it more easily.

If you want to maximize your chances of success when troubleshooting, you should first have adequate knowledge of the system you want to troubleshoot. In other words, you want a professional whose job is technology management or maintenance to do this process.

The first step to a successful troubleshooting strategy is to start with the basics. You’ll be able to easily and effectively rule out various simple solutions. Who knows--maybe the solution really is something easy that can be adjusted quickly. To provide an example of what troubleshooting looks like, we’ll use one that has a simple solution.

Imagine sitting down at your computer. You press the power button, but it doesn’t boot up. In fact, it doesn’t power on at all. Judging from this, you can tell that there is a connection or hardware issue. First, check all of the connections:

• Make sure that both ends of the power cord are plugged into both the power strip or outlet and the system respectively.
• Make sure the power strip is plugged into the outlet.
• If the computer is properly connected to a power source, consider whether you’ve added any new hardware to the PC recently. If so, this could be causing an issue.
• If neither of these solutions yield results, you could simply swap around the cables to see if you have a bad cord on your hands. If this doesn’t work, you might be looking at a failed power supply.

Of course, this is only one way you could troubleshoot a basic problem. Other solutions will be much more complex in nature, and you might be looking at countless other variables that could be complicating the situation. If you’re ever having trouble with your technology, let Microtechs help you troubleshoot the issues. To learn more, reach out to us at (415) 246-0101.