The weekends are finally here. You drop a bag of popcorn into the microwave. It’s the lightly salted and buttered kind, your favorite. You take a long pour from your 1.5L of coke into a 1L beer mug. Your doctor had said the sugar in it might kill you eventually, but everyone has to die at some point, right? Your blu-ray player is finally done with its firmware update and you’re ready to spend the next two hours watching ‘Midnight in Paris’. The phone rings. A ringing phone has to be answered, so you put aside your reluctance and pick it up. An ominous voice from the other end comes through.
“Hey, how are you doing bud? Listen, I have a problem with my computer.”
Death came for you after all, and you didn’t even get to sip your glass of coke.
I’m a fairly technically inclined individual. I build and troubleshoot my own computers. I take pride in the fact that when issues arise, I can remedy them without having to resort to reformatting, which in my opinion, really isn’t a solution at all. I remain cool when staring down the barrel of cryptic error messages, or worse, programs that fail silently. I’m usually about to dig deeply, analyze process calls, and determine which program is loading what module that’s faulting, thanks in no small part to the handy Sysinternals suite of tools. But when it comes to the “Help, my computer stopped working” phone call, I break out in cold sweat.
It’s never easy to help someone troubleshoot their computer, and here’s why.
1. You didn’t give me enough information to go on
People generally do poorly when it comes to describing the exact problems they’re facing. Be it a “this application won’t start”, or a BSOD, having the exact error message can go a long way in helping to solve the problem. Although some error messages are poorly worded, some can help narrow down the issue. If your computer has been working fine and you start randomly getting PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA BSODs out of the blue, there’s a high probability that it could a hardware issue, especially memory, than software. At the very least, it gives me something to go on.
How you can help me help you: Take a screenshot. Can’t do that because your computer blue-screened? Take a picture of your screen. No camera phone? Write down the error message. At the very least, let me know what you were trying to do and what the expected result was.
2. I don’t know what you have on your computer
I am usually cautious of, and maintain and a good inventory of what applications I install. Thus, when an error occurs, it is significantly easier for me to backtrack and reproduce the problem. I don’t know what’s on your computer. I don’t know that you’re running two different antivirus suites side-by-side, or that you installed every browser toolbar that you saw. I could tell you to click on the icon that looks like a computer with a tick on the monitor, only to find out later that you installed an icon replacement pack which makes it look like something else. More on this in the next point.
How you can help me help you: Download and run Speccy. Choose File -> Publish Snapshot after, and give me the url. It provides an overview of your computer’s specification and configuration, saving me a great idea of guesswork, or just even trying to guess what kind of a computer you have. For example, you can see the kind of info it provides from this snapshot I took of my computer.
3. It’s like Pictionary and inkblot tests
Most people I know still aren’t comfortable with letting someone else take control of their computer remotely, so it comes down to them giving me a vague description of something they’re looking at, and me guessing if they’ve done the previous step correctly. It’s like talking to a patient in therapy, asking ‘alright, what do you see now?’, ‘that’s good, go on’ and ‘so how does that make you feel?’. Okay, maybe not the last point, but you get the idea.
How you can help me help you: Trust me. There’s not much more advice I can give you other than to trust me. We’ve got some deeper friendship issues here if you consider me enough of a friend to ring me up with a computer issue, yet do not have sufficient trust to give me access under your watchful eyes.
4. There’s only so much I can do
Another contributing factor is freedom of action. I have full control over my own systems and even the network it resides within. This kind of liberty is often not present when dealing with other people’s computers. Like I mentioned previously, I rely on the Sysinternals suite and a number of other 3rd party tools to help me diagnose a problem, and there’s no way I can do that over the phone. I couldn’t just very well point someone to the tools either, because they’d have no idea what to do with it. It’s like having to do invasive surgery without any cutting instrument.
How you can help me help you: Probably nothing. At some point, I’m going to have to acknowledge that I can’t come to a solution, and you’re going to have to accept that. Maybe this is when I’d suggest that you back up your data and reformat.
I really salute those who work as phone support in IT companies. It’s not an easy job having to deal with both the technical and people aspects of the problem. I respect those who have to put up with what I described day in and day out for a living.