Wednesday 22 May 2013

Troubleshooting

It may come as a surprise to some, but sometimes your IT Guy does not know instantly what is wrong.

I know, it is a deep and hidden secret that we do not like to talk about, but at great risk to myself I am willing to admit it.

Sometimes we have no idea.

But no need to despair yet, we have the tools and the knowledge to find and fix the problems though.

When we start saying things like test and replicate, we are not referring to the Replicants of Blade Runner, as wonderful as that may be. Instead we are referring to the troubleshooting steps needed in order to get the error that you are getting.

As stated elsewhere, there are millions of lines of code in your software, and sometimes a new update perhaps, or a different hardware driver has unintended consequences.

In those cases we need to test and do what you did, in order to get the same result. Thus replicating your procedure and troubleshooting the problem.

Whether it is as easy as a new driver, or more involved and complex, we tend to get to the answer eventually.

You can rest with the reassurance that if we have no idea to start with, the more we do and the more time is spent looking and investigating, poking and prodding, we will get to the solution.

Sometimes you have to eliminate everything that is not wrong to get to what is.

This may not be an easy process and we know that you cannot afford downtime or slowing down, but once the answer and fix has been identified, it is usually resolved pretty quickly.

The biggest and best tools we have is experience and knowledge about how things should work, thus we can figure out why it doesn't.

All we ask for is a bit of time to allow the process and thinking to happen in order to get you back to your happy place.