This will be the last entry in the Self-Troubleshooting Series; this time I wanted to touch on a few common issues where the troubleshooting part wasn’t enough to fill up a whole Blog Entry. There are all kinds of issues that you will run into while working on your computer that will completely baffle you. They will make you want to pull out your hair or punch your grandmother in the face. Then, when a Tech shows up and fixes the problem in one step you’ll be looking for your gun to take out all of your shame and frustration on that poor geek that is just trying to help you out. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, there are some problems that you just have to have seen in order to know how to handle them. My goal here is two-fold, I’d like to help you save face and I’d like to keep geeks and grandmothers from getting hurt too badly.
I didn’t tell you to highlight!
We’ve all been there…it’s the end of the day and we want, desperately, to get out of the office. We just have to finish up this one little thing and we’re done. Freedom, sweet freedom! You computer has other ideas, whenever you click on something (an icon, some text, a link on a website) things get highlighted. It looks like you just took your mouse and dragged it across half the screen, when all you’ve really done is double-clicked one tiny little spot. What in the world is going on? Did you know that the most likely key on your keyboard to get stuck is the Shift Key? First of all, there are two of them and secondly they are larger than most of the other keys. Third, they get used a lot more often that you probably realize. Now, it may not look stuck, but the symptoms point to your Shift Key being held down by Computer Gremlins. Take your index finger and try your hardest to pound those little gremlins to death underneath those Shift Keys. A similar issue would be clicking on a program (or the Start Menu) and having it close down immediately. This would be a stuck Escape Key.
Gremlins don’t really exist (or do they?), the usual cause for this is eating over your keyboard, food and technology rarely go well together.
My screen is upside down!
Do you remember this commercial for AOL?
The truth is, when kids get around computers they don’t fix things by randomly striking the keyboard with plastic toys, instead they find key combinations that no one knows about except the original programmers. Oddly enough, through my own observations they seem most likely to hit the keys that flip your display completely upside down. I’ve personally seen it happen more than once and it takes much less time for the kid to do it than it take us to figure out how to change it back.
Press Ctrl + Alt + Up Arrow to change your display back to it’s normal orientation. For your own entertainment you can try pressing Ctrl + Alt + Down Arrow on your co-worker’s computer. This function is built into your Video Card, Intel Video Cards definitely have it, others might as well. If it doesn’t work for you, then your card doesn’t have it and your kid is just that much smarter.
My Wireless was just working!
How much do you love the fact that so many places offer free wireless internet access? If you need to get out of the office for an hour you can go to your favorite coffee shop, book store, or burger joint and still be fairly connected to the rest of the world. Well, you would be connected, except for the fact that your wireless seems to stop picking up available networks as soon as you take it out of your bag and turn it on to enjoy a few Youtube videos with your blueberry muffin. It was just working at the office, you were connected and everything was right with the world, so what changed?
Laptop manufactures have been flip flopping back and forth on the physical wireless On/Off switch for years. For probably 4 of the last 5 years laptops have had a physical switch, it has it’s positives and negatives, one of the biggest negatives is that it’s on the side of your laptop and when you’re putting it in or taking it out of the bag it can easily be turned off without you knowing about it. Look at the side (left or right, probably not both), look for a little picture of a wireless icon like the big picture over to the right of this section. If things aren’t working, you might try moving the On/Off Switch to the On position. That’s what I would do.
Three quick single step solutions to some surprisingly common problems. What simple solutions have you come across? Leave them in the comment section below and don’t forget to +1, Tweet, and Share this link on Facebook.
Dennis Edmondson Jr
Computing Concepts LLC
