Any of you reading this have been here before: You’re in the middle of an important project whether it be personal or business, and you encounter an error or an unexpected problem getting something done on your computer. Murphy’s Law seems to dictate that the more important the project is to you, the more complex or trying the problem seems to be. If there was any one secret that would decimate any computer problem, every tech support company in the world would be out of business. However, there are steps you can take to learn the thought process most of these computer gurus use to battle the toughest of conundrums.

Understand What’s Happening

One of my favorite cartoon shows growing up as a kid was G.I. Joe. Looking back as an adult, I can see where the show brought some important values to my life. The most important of which is the phrase “and knowing is half the battle.” It’s as true an axiom for combating Cobra Commander as it is for fighting your computer nemesis. The first key step to dealing with your computer problem is to ask yourself “What is the computer doing and how does it differ from what I expected?” I find it best to work with an example:

Sitting down to write an expense report for the fourth quarter stockholder’s meeting, Maximillion finds that when he starts up Microsoft Word, he encounters an error message that says “Word has encountered an error and needs to close. (51187x) Please contact your system administrator for assistance.”

A fairly daunting error message when sitting down for such an important task will almost always induce a fair amount of panic. But, never fear – with a grasp (even a non-technical one) on what’s happening, the battle is already half-way won. If you’re taking my advice, the first step in this example is you know you’ve opened up Word to create a document. You get an error. You expect it to open and let you begin your work, but it won’t. It spouts the above spurious error message. Unless you’re an encyclopedia of Microsoft error messages, it won’t immediately be clear what’s wrong.

Know Your Resources

This part of the process I generally refer to as “Google Is Your Friend,” and will often use this mantra around friends and family not to be mean, but to encourage them to research things for themselves. However, that’s not to say asking your geek friends isn’t in your repertoire of resources. You will likely find them a lot more willing to help, though, if you’ve already done your homework. A quick Google search for this spurious error message won’t likely return any results (except maybe this post) because I’ve invented it for the sake of example. But in a real-world situation you’ll likely find the error code comes up with at the very least an article from the software company explaining what has happened. If the explanation is still “Geek to you,” you may find further clarity Googling the terms, or seek out your Geek friends.

Searching Google has become such a ubiquitous tech support tool that sarcastic geeks even created a website called “Let Me Google That For You” which, through a specially crafted link, shows an animation of someone typing in your search term in a Google search box, and then it says “That Wasn’t So Hard, Was It?” and links you to the results.

Plan a Path of Least Destruction

In our example scenario, Maximillion’s report is due soon. A complete re-install of Microsoft Office may not be the wisest solution even if it turns out to be effective. In your Google search, you may yield an even simpler answer that leads you straight into a better solution. The beauty of the Internet is most questions you could ask have already been asked before and if you’re lucky, already been answered.

In this example, one search result contains a post from a friendly forum poster who asks: “I usually leave the computer password-protected so that I can control my children’s access with supervision. However, this past weekend I got up from the computer to check on dinner in the oven and the rascal sat down and logged on to a social networking site. While he was there he installed some sort of game that turned out to be a virus. After my antivirus program removed the virus, I tried to open up Word and got a weird error message with this number (51187x) telling me to contact my system administrator. I don’t have one of those! Please help!” A helpful commenter replies with some of the information they found Googling the explanation for the error, and suggests doing a roll-back to a recent Restore Point using Windows’ System Restore tool. This seemed to resolve the issue for the troubled poster.

Maximillion quickly finds that trying the solution that worked for the forum user resolves his issue and takes only a few minutes to complete. He’s able to get back to work without a huge amount of fuss.

Learn What Interests You

Solving your own problems doesn’t have to be all work and no fun. As you work on your own problems, you may have a topic tickle your fancy. You may not consider yourself a geek, but everyone has a little bit of geek inside them. Want to learn how to build your own computer? It’s not that hard. The primary obstacle to knowing more about the computer is the intimidating fear of screwing something up.

Become educated by reading up on the topics that intrigue you. Most computer geeks of the true form have had little to no formal training. Computer geeks read manuals and documentation for fun. They write code. In troubleshooting computers and operating systems (like Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux), geeks know the ins and outs of how the computer works. When it doesn’t work right, it’s a whole lot easier to see where the problem lies. Follow the steps outlined above, and you’ll quickly be on your way to solving any computer problem whether its hardware, software, or just not knowing how to get things done. You just may find yourself getting calls from your friends for help one day – and save them a call to the local big box store’s tech support squad.

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