The Problem Is Often the User Himself!
Many of the in-home service calls I go on end up being training sessions rather than repair jobs. That’s because beginners often have problems because of their inexperience and immediately jump to the conclusion that the computer is “broken.” Here are a few of the most common ones, which I generally handle over the phone during the initial consultation rather than making a trip out to the site:
- “The taskbar is gone.” The user has accidentally resized the taskbar so small that it’s just a thin bar across the bottom of the screen. I explain how to resize it.
- “My program is gone.” The user has deleted a shortcut from the desktop, and doesn’t realize that he can start the program using the Start menu. Alternatively, the user has accidentally deleted the program’s shortcut from the Start menu. I walk the user through recreating the shortcut.
- “My documents are gone.” The user is in an application program, such as Word, and has always stored his files in the My Documents folder. Someone has changed the file location that appears in the Open dialog box, and the user doesn’t know how to change folders. I give the user a quick tutorial on file and folder locations.
- “I can’t find the files I unzipped.” The user has used WinZip or some other unzip utility to extract files from an archive, but didn’t pay attention to the folder name where the files would be extracted. I either have them unzip again, and this type note the location, or use the Search (or Find) command to locate the files if their names are known.
Tags: accidentally, application, change, dialog box, Hardware, initial_consultation, my_documents_folder, open_dialog, shortcut, Software, taskbar, unzipped, unzip_utility, Windows, winzip
