Computers have become a part of our everyday lives, many people will have one at home and many jobs now require you to work from a computer also. It’s a fact of life that not all of us are as adept with technology as others, this usually means we’ll find ourselves stuck or think there is a problem that we cannot solve. Sometimes this will mean we’ll have to admit defeat and call up for IT support.
Obviously calling IT support when you have a problem is the best approach as that’s what they’re there for, to support you. But sometimes the problems we run across can be solved pretty quickly by ourselves and save calling out for support. These are just a few simple tests you can run to either fix the problem yourself or simply get a bit more information for the IT support technician to go off of.
Restarting your machine
Restarting your machine will normally be the first bit of advice any IT support technician will give you, it seems cliché and meaningless but you’d be surprised how many common freezes or crashes can be fixed by merely restarting your machine. Make sure you have backed up any work you were doing before hitting restart as not all programs will have auto-save features.
Backing up your work regularly
Making sure you back up your work frequently is a practice you should make a habit of. There are two ways to backup your work that are effective, the first is backing up to some sort of external media whether it’s a portable hard drive or on to CDs, the only disadvantage with this method is that you normally aren’t able to write to CDs again and portable hard drives can fail like the hard drive in your PC as well.
Backing up over your company network is the best option as your work will be stored on the company server which will have plenty of redundancy and backups to keep your work safe, also you can save your work as many times as you like to keep a recent copy.
Undo any recent changes
Sometimes installing new software can cause problems with your system so it’s worthwhile noting down any changes you’ve made; some companies do not allow users to install software for this exact reason. If you have installed anything recently, try uninstalling them to see if this fixes the problem. When calling your IT support department make sure to let them know any details or recent changes that may have led to the problem.
Sometimes computer problems can be fixed relatively quickly, these cases are normally where the user is able to give a lot of background information on their problem, this helps the IT support technician quickly diagnose the problem and fix your computer or cabling as soon as possible.
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