CompTIA IT Fundamentals FC0-U61 – IT Troubleshooting

1. Troubleshooting 101

But you’ve spent a lot of time viewing and thinking about how modern computing devices work. This episode explores a framework for troubleshooting with your skills and knowledge, and learning how to recognize when to contact tech support to escalate the problem to the pros.

Every computing device has four components that interrelate the central machine for processing and storage, input and output devices to enable you to interact with it, an operating system to tie the hardware together into something usable, and applications to help you do stuff with the machine. The machine parts of a computing device need two things power and connectivity. Power starts at the wall socket, then flows into the battery or power converter to run the computer. Any failure there will result in a dead computer.

Check this first. If the device seems to have power but still shows up as dead, then perhaps you have a connectivity issue. Check your cables. Are they connected properly? Are the cables good? Try a replacement cable, what’s called a known good cable to troubleshoot. If the device still seems dead at this point, contact tech support.

If the computing device has power and pieces connected properly and it seems to work sort of, but you can’t operate it properly, like you can’t log in or it’s stuck on the loading screen, the problem could be an operating system glitch. So reboot this so often solves the problem with computing devices that it should always be part of your troubleshooting repertoire. If, after a reboot, the operating system won’t come up or hang somewhere in the process, contact tech Support.

If you can log in properly but have trouble with an application like it won’t do what you think it should do, you have several troubleshooting options. Check the help files. In other words, try the Help menu. Alternatively, check the manufacturer’s website for help files or feature walkthroughs. If you have a specific problem with an application, try Googling it you don’t have to use Google, of course.

I mean, do a web search using one of the great tools available, like Yahoo or Bing or Google. Chances are very good that people on the Internet have had the same problem you face, and you might get a solution. If you follow all these steps and still can’t get a solution, escalate the problem and call Tech support. Thank you.

2. AMA – Ask Me Anything About Troubleshooting Computers Part 1

I wanted to take some time to hear from you and answer questions you might have on it, fundamentals or computer literacy. So that’s why we put together these ask Me Anything episodes. My friend Aaron is going to ask questions about stuff in this chapter from viewers like you. I also want to hear from you as well. My email is at the end of the episode ask me anything. So my grandpa always calls me and tells me his email isn’t working. Great grandpa. Yeah, of course. How do I help him troubleshoot? That good question. There can be so many different things that happen with email or many things that go wrong on a computer that you need to ask him specific questions. Right. So by trying to get him to nail down what he’s trying to do and what the machine is doing or not doing in response to his actions is a way for you to decide whether it’s a network connectivity issue, a user action activity that’s not happening. Right. It could be that what shows up on the screen will give you an error message, something that you can then look at and go, oh, that’s leading me down a different path. So you need to be able to ask very leading questions.

And one of the ways to question users is not to say, what did you do? Because they tend to go, I didn’t do anything. They’re already scared. Right. Because the computer doesn’t work right. And they can’t get their work done or do whatever. So you ask them leading questions.

Has it ever worked? Has your email ever worked? When was the last time it worked properly? Has anything changed on the computer since you did that last time? Constructed. Right. So you’re leading them to tell you what they did or didn’t do without actually accusing them of doing something wrong. Yeah. Right. So because the the accusation will shut them down. I see. Right. But but you need the specific answers to be able to figure out which direction to go in troubleshooting. So let’s get to the specific question.

How can you help your grandfather when his email is down? Right. There are a bunch of different things that happen to make email happen, right. You need network connectivity, so you need to be able to check that. Can you get to a website on your web browser? Right. A good way to kind of go is it the network that’s at fault. Right. If he’s trying to send a message to a particular person and that person is not getting it, this indicates there might be a problem not on his part, but on the end user part.

So one way to fix that, or at least check it, is to have the other user check his or her spam folder. Right. Because maybe something in the keywords in the subject line triggered the anti spam, which is part of every email client these days. And so maybe that triggered it and immediately just sent it to spam. I’ve gotten letters, emails from my mother lover that go instantly to my spam filter.

That’s a good point, mom, what’s happening here? Because she’d be like, why don’t you ever respond to me, son? And I’m like, what? Right. So that’s one good thing to check. It could be that it’s not that the message is down, but it could be that he’s typing in the email address incorrectly. Right. So that could be an issue. Or that he’s not typing in the full email address. Right. He might be going, Marieclair at Gmail and send. There you go. That’s not going to go anywhere, right?

Because you got to have the exodus. com on the app. So this could be another aspect of email. It could be that there are different email ISPs. Internet service providers and email clients have limitations on the size of files that you can attach to an email and send. With modern high end Internet speeds like we have here in my neighborhood, I can send a 50 megabyte file and not even blink. But if I’m sending that 50 megabyte file to my friend who lives in dial up land in Michigan in a rural town, there’s no way he’s going to get that email. I see. Right.

It’s just going to say, no, I can’t download something that huge. Right. So file size could be a limitation. It could also be, and I’m not sure how this would affect your grandpa, but I’m riffing on email, so I might as well just keep going. A lot of corporations will restrict specific file types from being sent via email. This is to avoid things like spreading viruses on a work network. So it’s to protect themselves and their users from their users and the bad people who are trying to take advantage of them. Right. So there’s a lot of possibilities. There’s a lot of possibilities. So you need to ask those questions like, what specifically are you trying to do? And walk me through the actions and the effects and have him describe the screens. Okay. And then if you can follow up while looking at the same kind of computer and just sort of clicking away.

This is another good way of being able to visualize what’s happening on the other end of the telephone. Yeah, it makes sense. I feel like I’m going to be able to help them next time very easily. Okay, so next is onto bella from Seattle, Washington asks, my computer is telling me I have low disk space, what do I do? Bella delete some stuff. That is an answer. What’s happening is every computer is designed to have a certain amount of hard drive space free to be used to use as what we call a swap file or a page file.

Fancy stuff. It just means temporary storage on the hard drive for stuff so that the computer continue to run multiple applications at the same time. Once the hard drive gets too full, that disk space is not able to be used properly, and then the system is going to slow down because it’s it’s having to work really hard to try and keep multiple Windows open at the same time and do the work that the user is trying to get them to do. So it’s giving you this low memory. There are not enough disk space error, and you’ve got a couple of fixes. This applies more to Windows than macOS.

Mac is pretty much selfcontained and you get that literally the only thing you can do is start deleting things. But with Windows, there are lots of temporary files and Windows updates and stuff, and Windows is really careful about keeping all the stuff that it changes. So when you get a big patch from Microsoft, for example, on Patch Tuesday, your operating system updates. But the old operating system, the pre patched version, stays in your temporary folders. So that adds up a lot over time. The tool we use in Windows to clean that up is called Disk Cleanup.

All right? You can get to Disk Cleanup by typing that’s the easiest way in Windows Ten. So just go to the little magnifying glass tool in the taskbar and click it and start typing Disk Cleanup, and it’ll pop up. Run that thing and it’ll clean out your recycle bin. It’ll prompt you to delete your temporary files, to delete downloaded files that you don’t need anymore, including old versions of Windows you can clean depending on the age of the system. And the last time Disk Cleanup was run, you could easily recapture 14 20GB worth of file space. Wow. Yeah. So try that first.

Right. Another option if you have a lot of multimedia files, right? Like you have a lot of movies that you legitimately ripped and put on your computer, right, right. Does take up a lot of space. So if you want to keep those but need to recapture some of your hard drive space, go buy an external hard drive. In fact, you can even get an external SSD, so it’s really fast. And just take all those movie files and move them over. Don’t copy that. Move over to the external drive.

And then you’ll free up space on your main system. So another great way, if you don’t have a USB port free or you don’t know that you have one, you can also use various cloud storage features to put stuff up on ICloud or in Dropbox, for example, or on Google Drive. So you can just move stuff off your main system up into the cloud and take advantage of cloud storage. Great. So there’s lots of ways to make space. Absolutely. Yeah. And when you finally exhaust all those possibilities, then it’s time to take your machine into Microcenter or Best Buy or Fries and say, I think I need a new hard drive. Oh, well, all right. Okay, so that’s a big deal. And you need a tech to.

3. AMA – Ask Me Anything About Troubleshooting Computers Part 2

I wanted to take some time to hear from you and answer questions you might have on It fundamentals or computer literacy. So that’s why we put together these Ask Me Anything episodes. My friend Aaron is going to ask questions about stuff in this chapter from viewers like you. I also want to hear from you as well. My email is at the end of the episode ask Me Anything. Shanika from Austin, Texas asks, my PC runs slowly. What can I do and what software can I use to view the health of my PC? It’s a good question. It’s a good question.

The PC runs slowly for a lot of reasons. So let’s look at software first and then think about some other things that could be going wrong. The software tool that you can access very quickly to look at the resources being used by your computer and by resources. That’s a fancy term for the CPU. How hard is it working? How full is your Ram?

The tool that you can use is called Task Manager. And you can get to Task Manager in a couple of ways. You can go directly there by pressing Control Shift and Escape at the same time. That will just open up Task Manager. Okay, task manager. You can also press CTRL Delete once, and then it’ll give you a little screen saying, do you want to open Task Manager? Either way for it? Once you have Task Manager open, you can look at the various resources being used. You can see all of the applications that are loaded, all the background applications loaded. You can look across the screen and see CPU utilization.

You can see network usage. You can see how much Ram is being actively used, how much hard drive access there is. I made a foolish mistake and downloaded a program that syncs with some very aggressive network storage. Right. And so every time I boot my computer up, that application immediately goes onto the network to see all the files that have changed. Right. And the effect of that is my computer runs really slowly. Oh, wow. Right. And the way I know that that’s the activity that’s happening is because I ran Task Manager and there it was, 100% disk utilization. Right. So it’s just the hard drive is getting pounded as files are getting moved from the network onto my laptop and vice versa. So the only fix for that was to uninstall that program. Okay. Right. No other way. Just to stop it from doing what it was designed to do. I see.

Well, that’s good to know. That will be very helpful. Here’s a pretty common question from Bill in Washington DC. My Internet isn’t working. What do I do? Oh, boy. Okay, so there’s a zillion reasons why the Internet is down. Is it really down? You tell me. Going to specific questions, right? Let’s walk through the path to the Internet being down or up. You have your client computer of some sort. It is connected via wire or wirelessly to your switch, your router, your Internet Service provider, your cable modem or DSL, whatever connection you have to the Internet. So there’s that string of connectivity in devices already. Then we also have connectivity between your machines and the Internet Service Provider. Right. So if that goes down, then the Internet’s down.

The rest of the Internet is working great. It’s just your little slice of heaven is no longer all that delightful. That’s all that matters. Right. But then from the Internet Service Provider that in turn connects up the chain to the backbone of the Internet, to other big servers on the Internet that make it all all these big connections happen. So if there’s a problem in that connection, this can cause the Internet in your bigger slice of heaven to be down.

This happens when big natural disasters happen, like hurricanes flow up or super storm Sandy some years ago just took out some of the Internet routers, the big ones, and so it just shut cities down. In that case, the Internet really was down, at least for big swaths of the country. So by thinking holistically of all the different pieces that have to connect for the Internet to be functional, then you can start troubleshooting.

Can I get to my ISP? Can I access other computers on my network? Right. Is my wireless working? Oftentimes with wireless we have to the machines just get tired or something, and the only fix for that is to reboot the router. Right. So unplug it, wait for 10 seconds, plug it back in, somehow they just magically fix themselves. Right? Yeah. So there can be that a phone call to the Internet Service Provider saying, please run a check on my line to see if that could be a problem. These are things that users can do. This is not techie stuff. Right. You’re just kind of looking, is it plugged in? Is this thing working? Did some electrical switch in my house flip? Right. So the power in one room is out.

I don’t know. Right. But there’s many things that you as a user can check before you ever have to call tech support. But then the tech support call is totally legitimate. Right. Make that call to your ISP and say, please check my line. Yeah. Okay. So we’ve gone through all of the list of things to check for, and now it’s time for me to call tech support. Okay. Sometimes when I dreaded call yes, the dreaded call. Of course, sometimes they use some jargon that I’m not totally familiar with. Can you give me some tips on how to navigate a great tech service call? Absolutely.

Part of the beauty of the It fundamentals course is you now have a lot more language than you did when you started. Absolutely. Right. And so you should be able to at least understand how the systems work and how the applications and network and stuff works. Even if you forget the specific words, you now have an idea of how the whole thing works.

That’s true. Right. And so the beauty of that is you can stop the tech when he or she starts going into some topic and go, could you explain that to me in human terms instead of techie terms? That’s totally legitimate, by the way. Okay. Sometimes tech people will just use jargon because that’s the correct word for what they’re trying to do. But if you don’t know what that jargon means, you need to ask, and what does that mean? How does that show up on what I’m looking at? Okay, right.

And another thing is to be very specific, just like with your grandpa, just like with Bill and my Internet’s town, you need to be very specific with these are the error messages I’m getting. This is the issue that I’m having. This is what I’ve tried. Makes sense. And with the ISP kind of going back to that, the first thing they’re going to have you do is reboot your system. So you should do that before you call them. Yeah. Just because that that goes magic, you know. I don’t know why, it just does. So reboot the system and they’re going to ask you that even though if the problems still manifest when you call them and you’ve rebooted your system and they’re going to have you reboot the system again. Just reboot the system. Do it. Just let them. They have a script. Right.

Because most tech calls are the same thing. Right. There are these top ten things that go wrong because users are users, right. And they do stuff that is not necessarily good. You go to a website, you click on something okay, that was bad. Yeah. Right. But because that’s something that we all do, the tech support people have a list of things that they want to go through first to solve all the easy stuff. Okay? Okay. So just go through the list and whenever they ask you to do something that you’re not following, just have them step back and say, walk me through that one more time, more slowly, please.

Okay. Another thing is a lot of tech support is outsourced, right. So there might be a language issue or an accent issue. So depending on how well you are at understanding an Indian accent or a New York accent right. There could be all kinds of different people on the other line. And so it’s again, completely legitimate to say, we say that one more time, more slowly, please. Okay, right. And to give yourself time to hear the words and what they’re saying and be able to follow what they’re asking you to do. Okay, that’s good. So take things slow and you’ll get there.

That’s right. Absolutely motivating. Yeah. And the final piece of advice is try not to get frustrated. Okay. Right. Because you’re already there right? Because your computer is not working. And so the technician is your friend. Right. The tech call you’re making is to your friend who’s trying to help you, okay? But he or she has a list of stuff. Go through that list with him, okay? And follow through. And try not to get mad if it doesn’t get fixed right away, because there are so many different things that can cause computer problems. He’s shooting in the dark as well. Right. So trying the simple things first, and then go to the more complicated things so eventually you’ll get there. It might take a little while on the tech call. It’s worth it. So be patient, okay? Be patient. It’ll be worth it. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Thanks so much. That concludes the questions for Chapter 14. Thank you, Scott.