Its all in the details. I can’t stress this enough. There is little to no point in saying to your geeky friend “My computer is fucked, can you fix it.” Aside from the unnecessary use of the word “fucked”, it leaves a great many things up to the Geek’s imagination and given that they spend 95% of their lives online – you do not want this to happen.
1. Error Messages:
If your computer is producing error messages, WRITE THEM DOWN! I will assume that if this blog is for you, taking screen shots is far outside you area of abilities, so it’s back to the mighty pen with you. Often an error message will contain the answer to your problem, and if a Geek Friend has that as their starting point, they can have your computer back the way you want it faster, and get back to the actually cool geeky shiz they want to be doing, faster.
2. What did you do before this happened? :
Nothing is NOT an answer. Computers don’t magically take on a life of their own, surf porn on their own, download crap on their own, or delete system files on their own. Think carefully about you have done recently even if, ESPECIALLY IF, you think you have done nothing wrong.
3. Unsure if doing something will destroy your system? :
Then DON’T do it! I always tell people not to be afraid of computers, there usually isn’t that much damage you can do to them. It’s when someone who believes themselves to be the founding member of anonymous, but actually have the computing ability of fractured pet rock, that things can start to go horribly wrong. If you are one of these people be sure to re-read item 2. A little bit of googling, youtubing and the like will generally point you in the right direction. WARNING: should you hear or read the word Registry, Config File, Command Prompt or Partition Editor DO MORE RESEARCH, then approach your geeky friend with your findings, BEFORE doing anything. If 99% of the information or directions you are reading make absolutely no sense, you have no business being there.
4. Have you tried turning it off and on again? :
This catch phrase has been made popular by the tv series IT Crowd, and guess what! IT WORKS! A good portion of the time turning something off and on again fixes it. Why? IT JUST DOES! One of my ‘learned’ colleagues near lost his mind because he couldn’t write to a samba share on our development server (he uses Win 7, I use KDE). I SSH’d into it to check the config – it was fine, I could write to it… I was at a loss thinking I had messed something up. Finally I said “Have you tried restarting your shit OS?”. He glared at me, restarted his PC, and you’ll never guess what. He could write to the share.
5. If you’ve been given advise, and you disregarded it – suck it.
If your Geeky Friend has advised you to do, or not do a particular thing and you destroy your PC, fall victim to a virus or scam… Your Geeky Friend is allowed to say IN YOUR FACE as much as they like. You must treat them as gods and bow down before their cranial superiority. Oh, and get them beer.
That is all..
Oz to da SHizOrgOut.
Leave a Reply