Do you ever have a problem with your computer, programs, wordpress or need tech support...

Excellent cheat sheet for creating some work for us IT professionals to earn our living.

I especially like the iterations that causes an unknowledgable computer user to test out different menu choices and googled advice, that he/she may not be qualified to follow, for half an hour before giving up.

Before those iterations the cost of having a professional fix the problem might have been $50-100. I might even fix it for free if my customer called me and we could get things to work over the phone in 5-10 minutes.

After those iterations, the support cost easily ends up at $200-300.

I have a problem with my computer Can they fix personal differences?

I LOVE it. I'm going to print it out and take it with me!

As for "turn it off and turn it on again" (SimonHarrison) - I have clients who think I'm a GENIUS because I've told them to do just that and it works!!

Carol

I have an even more impressing action that will leave the ones you help with the impression of you being some kind of a healer with "warm" hands.

Example follows;

• A customer calls me telling me that his server has stopped for some reason
• The customer tells me he has tried to push the on/off button without anything happening
• I ask the customer to leave the server alone and to detatch the power cable
• I turn up at the customers site 30-45 minutes later
• I attach the power cable to the server, touches it with my "warm" hands and then push the on/off button
• The server starts up as it should

Power supplies sometimes hang, probably caused by some voltage hangup in their internal circuitry. So, alas, it's the time passed detached from the power cable that does the trick, not my "warm" hands.

And of course the next question is: Is it powered on?

No, no, no! That doesn't work anymore! They say "of COURSE it's plugged in, I'm not an idiot!" - so you have to be sneaky.

"Sometimes dust gets in the outlets. Unplug your computer, blow in the outlet to clear the dust, and then plug it back in."

Idiot moron on the phone goes down there thinking you're pulling his leg, and sees that it's unplugged. He thinks "oh crap, I'm an idiot," but realises you don't know this! So he makes loud blowing noises in the outlet, then plugs it in. Which, of course, solves the problem!

"Hey, thanks, that did the trick."

This also works with keyboard cables, mouse cables, monitor cables, USB ports...

You don't ************************EVER********************** ***** want to tell a stranger how to do ANYTHING destructive! DON'T speak about the registry, because they may wipe it out, or change it. SAME THING with msconfig. OK, true story time! Is everyone comfortable?

I'll wait......

OK? Good!

Maybe most people here don't remember, but there USED to be a set of codes called ASCII. They covered not only 0-9 and a-z, but various commands which were called things like escape, C/R, and CONTROL CODES! The CONTROL CODES did special things. ^J(aka control J) was linefeed, ^M was CR, ^I was tab, ^S was PAUSE transmission(XOFF), ^Q was start transmission(XON), ^@ was do nothing(null), and ^C was TERMINATE PROGRAM. Perhaps some have used ^C(hold down the control key while pushing C) to terminate a LINUX or UNIX program here. BTW M/S wants to do things differently, so windows uses this as the COPY TO BUFFER command. 8-(

Well, I had only been programming a decade or so, and hadn't yet learned how stupid some people can be. So I went out on a support call. I had to stop a process, and I made a BIG mistake. Someone was near me when I hit ^C! I left, and things were working FINE!

A couple days later, we got a call. Things weren't posting. I thought IMPOSSIBLE!!!!!!! NO WAY!!!!!!! Eventually, I found that they hit ^C right after the invoices printed! ON PURPOSE! I asked why, and they said that it made things run faster! All they wanted were the invoices!

I told them that we WEREN'T trying to slow things down. It was actually doing stuff!

Anyone here want to guess what it was doing??????????

YEP, POSTING!!!! And WHAT is the point of printing invoices if you don't track them anyway?

Steve

I understood! I was just emphasizing that you should NEVER help them out there! People fall into pretty much three groups.....

1. Those that intuitively know a lot, and know what they DON'T know! I, for example, won't even open another persons computer without their permission and their knowing the risks, and NEVER without the proper precautions. I will try to research when needed. If I use a transformer on a laptop. I try to make sure it is IDENTICAL. If I have no choice, I try to make sure the voltage and amperage are the same, and that the polarity is right.
2. Those that are scared to go farther, and will ask almost anything!
3. Those that think they can do anything without any fear. I have seen people switch transformers, etc... and FRY systems.

I used to not know that #3 was such a large group. My story was about such a group.

Steve