Introduction to PC Troubleshooting

Introduction

When your computer breaks, your first instinct might be to pick it up and toss it from a high window. Or maybe you've gotten so angry at your computer that your skin has turned green and you've destroyed a few blocks of your neighborhood in uncontrollable rage. We've all been there.

But when your computer breaks, the last thing you want to do is get angry.

PC troubleshooting requires that you step back from the problem, take a deep breath, and consider what Sherlock Holmes would do. Any good tech knows that you've got to apply a little bit of the scientific method to a PC problem to get anywhere in troubleshooting.

If you want to fix your computer, you need to follow a simple, three-step process.

• First, you have to identify the problem by analyzing the computer.
• Once you determine the problem, you should test solutions.
• After you find a fix that gets rid of the problem, you can complete the troubleshooting process by documenting the fix, tidying the computer, and running specific utilities to help avoid the problem in the future.

The next three chapters take you through this process, breaking down each step so that you can understand what you should do and why you should do it. This lesson won't teach you how to fix a specific problem on a computer, but if you follow these steps, you can eventually fix any problem on any computer.

Let's move on to Chapter 2, where we'll talk about the first step in the process.

Identify the Problem

You can break the identification process into several related substeps:

• Analyzing symptoms
• Determining possible causes
• Discovering recent changes

Let's look at all three substeps.

What happens or doesn't happen when you try to do something on the PC? Symptoms fall into several categories.

• Dead PC
• Dead PC with acrid scent
• PC works; can't access the Internet
• Partially dead PC; the operating system fails to load
• PC won't respond to command
• Error message appears when you attempt an action
• PC locks up when you attempt an action
• Blue Screen of Death

Each symptom points to different possible causes. To determine possible and probable causes, you need to draw on your knowledge of how the PC works that you learned in Lesson 1.

First, ask "What can it be?" Explore the possibilities.

Second, don't limit your thinking. As soon as you say, "It must be 'X' that caused the problem," you have greatly weakened your troubleshooting ability. A couple of examples will help make this essential troubleshooting step clear.

Example 1: Dead PC

Imagine that you try to start up your computer one day, but nothing happens. You press the power button and the computer remains completely turned off. It doesn't beep, none of the fans spin up, no lights blink on and off . . . nothing. If you knew nothing about computers, you wouldn't know what to do. But because you understand what happens when a computer turns on, you can trace the steps to figure out which component might have caused the problem.

A working PC goes through these steps after you press the power button.

• First, the power supply starts up and performs a diagnostic on itself. If that diagnostic fails, then the computer doesn't start.
• If the diagnostic succeeds, the motherboard and CPU start up and begin looking for a bootable drive. The PC lights flicker, and the PC beeps once or twice.
• Once it finds a bootable drive, the computer starts to load whatever operating system it finds there.
• If that doesn't work, you get an error message.

In this example, the computer doesn't start up at all, so you don't get an error message. That points to a failure somewhere in the first couple of boot steps. Let's start at the beginning.

How does the power supply work? It plugs into an electrical outlet, either directly or through a surge suppressor; draws electricity in; and then powers the motherboard and components. Most power supplies have an on/off switch and a switch to change voltage from 110 (the standard in the United States) to 220 (the standard in much of the rest of the world).

So, what could cause the power supply to fail to supply power to the motherboard and components?

Wow! Who knew that a single device could have so many possible causes for failure?

Once you've listed the possibilities—on paper or just in your mind—try to work through what's most probably the cause for the dead PC. This third step involves asking yourself, "What has changed recently?"

If an electrical storm tore through the area the night before, cutting off all the power for a while, that could fry a component. If the cleaning people came through and moved the computer to vacuum behind it, that could lead to a different probable cause, right? They might have flipped the switch on the surge suppressor or computer to the off position, or they might have inadvertently unplugged something.

Example 2: Dead PC with Acrid Scent

Imagine the same scenario as the first one. You press the power button and nothing happens. The only difference between this scenario and the first one is that the computer has a nasty, acrid smell. Although all the potential causes for failure apply to this scenario, the smell points to a specific failed electronic part.

To solve the problem, use your nose. If the smell comes from the power supply, the power supply has fried. If the smell is more general, use your eyes. Does anything on the motherboard appear unusual or melted? The figure below shows a blown capacitor on a motherboard.

Closeup of a motherboard with melted or blown capacitors

Example 3: No Internet

Beyond knowing what the pieces of hardware inside your computer do, you should also understand the operating system. The next lesson will delve into this issue. Hardware fails occasionally, but software—the operating system and the programs that run on it—fails much more often. If you know how Windows is supposed to work, you can save yourself a lot of time and frustration.

If you can figure out what part of the computer is affected by a problem, you can also tell which parts aren't affected, which is almost as useful.

Say, for example, the computer refuses to connect to the Internet. Right away, you can disregard problems with the video card. You can ignore RAM issues as well, because with bad RAM, the computer wouldn't function at all. You can also skip looking at the power supply, monitor, sound card, and so on.

What could cause a computer to fail to connect to the Internet? Could hardware cause the problem? Certainly. What about software? Of course. In a later lesson, we'll go into network troubleshooting in detail, but here's a sketch of how most people connect to the Internet and the hardware and software involved.

The Internet connection goes into a box, such as a cable modem or DSL receiver, via a cable. This box connects to another box, called a router, via another cable. Both boxes require electricity. The router requires configuration, too. From the router, another cable connects to the network adapter port on the PC. If the router offers wireless capability, then devices can connect via radio waves rather than wires.

Windows must be configured properly to work with the router. The network adapter also needs special software called drivers so that it can work with Windows. Finally, the browser software, such as Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer, needs to be installed and functional.

If something breaks at any point in this process, the Internet goes down. The next step involves discovering the most probable culprit. Think about any recent changes or activity to narrow your search.

Are you getting an idea of how the troubleshooting process works? We'll use this process many times in this course. Let's move on to Chapter 3 and discuss the second step.

Research and Test Solutions

The next step of figuring out how to fix a computer is also the most comprehensive one.

Once you figure out which part of the computer has the problem and you know about recent changes to the computer, check the Internet for information. In short: Google it (or use a different search engine, like Bing).

Why Use the Internet?

No matter how obscure the problem, someone has had it before, and that person probably posted about it on an Internet forum. Internet forums, or discussion boards, provide a great resource for troubleshooting a computer. You can ask questions about anything, and then other people will try to answer them. Or you can simply search to see if anyone else has asked about a problem similar to the one you face.

Say, for example, you keep getting an error message when trying to open Microsoft Word. You've tried to figure out which part of the computer causes the problem, but to no avail. Recent changes should not affect Word. You have hit a troubleshooting wall.

Fortunately, you can just pop open a Web browser, head to www.google.com, and type in the content of the perplexing error message. I can almost guarantee that you'll find the solution to the problem on the first page of links.

Googling a problem

Reminder

I can't overstate this: Using the Internet to research a PC problem can get you through just about any tech problem you might encounter. If you take nothing else from this course, just remember to plumb Google or Bing thoroughly for information before spending $200 to repair the computer.

Check out the links in the Supplementary Material section for tips on making your searches targeted and efficient.

Test a Solution or Solutions

After doing some Internet research, you'll most likely have a list of fixes to try out.

Finding answers on the Internet helps you narrow down the troubleshooting and can greatly decrease the amount of time you spend testing solutions.

Here's an important point: Try the simple fixes first.

If you've decided that the problem lies with hardware, your best bet for a fix will be something like, "Replace part X with one that you know works." Techs call this testing with a known good part. Computer components don't cost a lot these days, so if the power supply goes bad, you don't fix it—you buy a new one. Likewise with RAM, hard drives, video cards, and so forth.

Note

At this point, having computer tech experience helps. You can't test new parts if you don't know how to replace parts inside a computer. Later in this course, you'll learn hardware tech skills.

If you think the computer has a software problem, you can uninstall or reinstall the offending program. If the operating system has a problem, you can run through fixes you've found on the Internet. Some OS problems, such as particularly harmful viruses, are simply too serious to fix. In that case, you might need to back up your personal data and reinstall the operating system. Two upcoming lessons cover viruses in great detail.

Troubleshoot Methodically

It's often tempting to go hog wild and change setting after setting on the computer in a mad effort to get things working again. Resist that urge! If you change too much at once, how can you determine what actually fixed the computer? Instead, try one fix at a time, testing each time to see if the fix worked.

If the change doesn't have the desired effect or breaks something else, revert that change. Do this with each potential fix.

This process can take some time, but it offers its own rewards. Testing solutions methodically will always beat out randomly trying whatever fixes you can think of all at once. Often, if you get too wild with doing multiple fixes at once, you can end up creating greater problems than you had when you started. It's a short step from a computer with one or two issues to a hopeless mess.

Regardless of your level of preparation, you may encounter a problem that's just too tough for you to crack. If this happens, you need to practice escalation—basically, getting help. Ask your company's IT personnel, or if it's your personal computer, take it into a computer repair shop.

Are you ready to learn about the last step in the process? Then let's move ahead to Chapter 4.

Complete the Job

Once you find the problem and implement a correct solution, you need to do the last step of the troubleshooting process: Complete the job. Completion can take up to five steps:

1. Document the problem and solution.
2. Tidy the computer.
3. Run software utility programs.
4. Update software.
5. Implement a proper backup regimen.

This chapter gives you concrete examples of the first two steps and an overview of the next three. Later in the course, we'll spend an entire lesson on steps 3 through 5.

The first step, documenting the problem and the solution, means writing down important information. You need to include the symptoms, the cause (if known), and the solution you applied that fixed the computer. Working techs must document; that way you get paid and the boss knows what you've done. Further, documenting helps later techs analyze and troubleshoot more quickly in some cases. Finally, documenting helps supervisors find patterns in events that occur all over the company that an individual tech might not catch.

Let's look at a couple of scenarios that techs often face.

Scenario 1: The Slob

You take a tech call from Joe, over in Accounting. His keyboard doesn't work. When you arrive at his workstation, you discover crumbs and soda stains on the keyboard and, logically enough, sticky keys or a shorted-out keyboard. Joe eats and drinks over his keyboard and has fouled it up.

Replacing the keyboard will fix the problem, but documenting that fix helps the next tech who gets that call from Joe. He or she will know to bring a replacement keyboard when visiting Joe's cubicle . . . and that will save a trip to pick up a replacement component.

That's just not pretty

Scenario 2: The Attack

You take a tech call from Theresa, over in Sales. Her computer runs slowly, and she can't access folders shared over the network. When you get there you find, after a time, that her computer has contracted a particularly nasty virus and that it came from a link in a message from the company president.

Running the proper antivirus software fixes the problem, but documenting helps the supervisor. She discovers, after reading reports of the day's activities from all the techs, that 31 other computers contracted the same virus with the same source. She knows to head to the boss's computer to test it for a virus to stop the next attack.

The boss shouldn't click on those links!

With your own computer, documenting a problem and solution doesn't demand the same level of compliance. You have the machine, the problems, and the fixes in your memory. Still, if you encounter a complicated problem, make a couple of notes and tape the paper to the inside of the PC case. (Make sure not to cover any vents, though!) That information might come in handy down the road.

After documenting the problem and solution, tidy the computer. This means different things depending on the specific problem and solution. With a hardware problem, you should practice good cable management, tighten down screws, replace the side of a case if you or someone else removed it, and so forth. Even if the computer didn't have properly managed cables, clean things up and leave the computer better than you found it. The pictures below show a typical case and a case with nicely managed cables.

With a software problem and solution, tidying means deleting any files downloaded to help fix the problem. You don't want to leave a computer with the executable files for the latest antivirus or antimalware programs, for example. You've presumably installed the programs, so the executable files just add to the debris and might confuse the customer.

Once you've finished cleaning up, it's time to run software utility programs. Windows comes with several useful utilities. These include Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter, both found here: Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools. I'll cover both programs extensively in Lesson 5.

Updating software can make a system more stable and powerful. Completing this task after fixing a hardware or software problem can make a client much more likely to call you when the next problem arises because you went the extra mile to make sure everything ran smoothly. This step includes updating applications, such as Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop, and updating Windows. (Remember to ask permission before making any changes to someone else's computer, including software updates.)

Implementing a backup solution for a computer protects the customer—or you, if it's your computer—from future problems. If the computer goes south sometime down the road, a good backup can make the difference between heartbreak and a blip of inconvenience. In Lesson 5, we'll cover the steps for updating Windows and setting up a proper backup.

You've learned a lot today! When you're ready, go to Chapter 5 for a quick recap.

Summary

Knowing how to approach a troubleshooting job methodically and logically, not to mention how to do your own research, will help you tremendously.

First, figure out which part of the computer the problem affects. Discover any recent changes. These two short steps can save you countless hours of frustration.

When you understand the problem, list all the possible causes that you can imagine. Then start with the easiest, most obvious solutions and, if necessary, move to more complex or difficult ones.

Test solutions one by one. Trying a bunch of fixes at once leads to trouble. You should also do research before you try anything. You might find an answer to the problem with a simple Google search.

Once you’ve fixed the computer, complete the process. Document the problem and solution, especially if you’re a working tech. Tidy up the computer for the customer. Install any necessary updates for the operating system or applications. Set up a proper backup regimen for the computer as well.

That’s it for this lesson, but if you have any questions or comments, you’re more than welcome to voice them in the Discussion Area. In Lesson 3, we’ll begin our in-depth discussion of operating systems with an overview of the tools and features found in Microsoft Windows.