The ancient art of solving any computer problem
Expert’ is a relative term – by which I mean it’s a term that our relatives use. “Ask Luis, he’s the computer expert,” my mother-in-law will say, to anyone who
will listen. I’ve spent more than twenty years fixing other people’s problems, so I’m used to being called an expert, but the reality is that every family has its own expert.
To qualify, you just need to be the youngest adult in the room that owns a PC. Sooner or later, your grandma or your uncle or your sister-in-law will mention that their laptop is broken or iTunes keeps crashing, and you’ll feel guilted into taking a look at it. Whether or not you ultimately manage to fix it makes no difference; you’ll still be the computer expert. After all, you’ve just spent a frustrating Sunday afternoon downloading drivers or booting in and out of Safe Mode, so you must know what you’re doing.
But this is no way to live. Nobody wants to be that sort of expert; it’s not effective and the hourly rate is terrible. There are people who actually enjoy pointlessly fiddling with computers, but you aren’t one of those people and neither am I. What we both want is to spend the minimum time fixing computers, and the maximum time actually using them. It doesn’t matter whether you are fixing your own computer, doing a favour for a relative or even fixing computers professionally; the goal is always to find the quickest, simplest fix that works.
That’s the difference between an expert and a guru. A guru can listen to a long, rambling list of unrelated symptoms and decide which ones need fixing and which ones don’t. A guru knows how to Google quickly for the right answer. A guru understands when to spend time on a problem and when to spend money. Most importantly, a guru doesn’t spend his spare time swapping RAM or reinstalling Windows – he spends it playing PC games. A guru enjoys all of the kudos of being an expert, with none of the hassle – and I am going to teach you how to be one.
Let’s start with your own PCs. You need two: a desktop and a laptop. The laptop should be cheap and the desktop should be mid-range. You may be tempted to combine the two and get an expensive laptop: don’t. The desktop is for games, which means you need a large monitor, a respectable graphics card and CPU, and good speakers. If you try to do this on a laptop, you will end up paying far more for the same performance – and using an external monitor, speakers and mouse on a laptop, just turns your laptop into an unwieldy desktop. You also want to be able to upgrade the graphics card once during the working life of a games PC, and this is all but impossible to do with a laptop.
Once you free your laptop from gaming duties, you can get by with a £400 model that will do all the workaday tasks, like sofa surfing, email, word processing and spreadsheets. This ring-fences the activity most likely to cause computer problems (that is, gaming) from all the other things you need a computer for, and it means that whichever one breaks, you’ve got another one to use for Googling solutions.
Put the desktop PC on the table, not the floor and turn the case so that it faces sideways. If you have it with the front facing towards you, like most people do, the rear becomes a stagnant tangle of cables that never gets dusted. Some of that dust will get pulled back into the case and coat your motherboard, which means the poor clearance interferes with case ventilation.
Back up both of your PCs once a month without fail. These should be complete clones of the entire hard disk using Acronis True Image onto an external USB drive that is at least as large as the internal drive in your PC. Use a different backup drive for each PC. Don’t keep your documents on the internal hard disks at all. Put them in cloud storage, like Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox or Google Drive. This entirely saves you from the responsibility of backing up those small, important, frequently changing files, which is most of what you need a backup for in the first place. Those clone drives are just there for disaster recovery.
SURPRISING ADVICE
If you’re giving advice to others, then you should tell them, “don’t build your own computer.” Ten years ago this was a good way to learn how a PC was put together, but from a support perspective you’re just making things hard for yourself. It’s also much harder to claim on the warranty when something doesn’t work, because all the manufacturers will blame each other for any incompatibility.
Don’t ever reformat and reinstall Windows. This is the last apple at the bottom of the troubleshooting barrel. It takes ages, the PC is never quite the same afterwards and it doesn’t fix the problem. If you are desperate enough to reinstall Windows, you are desperate enough to get a new PC – which will fix the problem. Don’t update your drivers, either. I know that this is the first item on just about every troubleshooting flowchart ever, but after 20 years, I have come to the conclusion that this is a stalling tactic dreamt up by customer support hotlines to get you to go away for a few hours. Unless you know of a specific bug in your current driver release that you are personally experiencing and the release notes for the new version explicitly mention that this bug has been fixed, all you are doing is adding one more variable into the mix. New drivers are just as likely to introduce new bugs as fix old ones, so higher version numbers aren’t necessarily better.
With this foundation laid, your PCs will definitely never ever break or crash. When they inevitably do anyway, you will find that all computer problems fall into one of five categories.
1. SPONTANEOUS BREAKAGE
“It was working fine until I dropped it”
The first category is for computers that abruptly transition from working to not working. This could be the entire computer refusing to boot up at all, or it could be that you can’t connect to Steam, or maybe Watch_Dogs has scrambled textures. It doesn’t matter what stopped working, the important part is that it stopped suddenly.
Spontaneous Breakage is the easiest problem to diagnose; it occurs because something changed. Either a hardware component failed or you added something that was incompatible with the rest of the machine. Identify the last time you can definitely say that the PC was working, and the problem must lie with something that changed since then. Uninstall any new software or restore your PC back to the previous full backup and see if the problem goes away. Then repeat any Windows updates and reinstall programs one by one until it returns, just to make sure.
If you haven’t added anything to the PC recently and it broke anyway, then you can be sure that a hardware component has failed. If the PC won’t boot, you can usually tell which component is dead by how far into the boot sequence the PC gets. But if you aren’t sure, you should just replace the RAM, PSU, graphics card and hard disk – in that order. This is so that you check the easiest components first, not the most likely. Your assessment of likelihood is probably wrong, and you’ll save time in the long run if you get into the habit of checking the easy things first. You might think that a game with messed-up textures can only be caused by a faulty graphics card, but RAM and PSU faults can both cause this as well, and they are both much cheaper to replace.
Inevitably, you’ll end up replacing some perfectly good components unnecessarily this way. So you should always buy upgrades, rather than exact replacements. That way, all your wrong guesses are at least upgrading your PC along the way – and you can hang on to the parts.
2. REPRODUCIBLE CALAMITY
“Every time I try, it just crashes”
If you can reliably crash an application or generate one of those error messages that end-users were clearly never meant to see, then congrats! You have found a bug.
Finding bugs is a well-paid job for some people, so if you enjoyed finding it, you should consider a career in software Quality Assurance – but bear in mind you have only found one so far, so don’t get too carried away. There is generally nothing you can do about a bug except report it to the developers (if they give you an easy way to do this, of course) and hope and/or pray that it gets fixed in the next version.
In reality, this is rather like voting in a general election: it’s your duty to do it, but it doesn’t actually make any difference. In the meantime, you’ll just have to work around the bug, but at least you don’t need to waste any more time looking for a solution. After all, most of the developers won’t, either. (That’s satire, that is.)
3. CREEPING BADNESS
“It’s just getting worse and worse”
‘Badness’ nearly always means that your PC is getting slower. And normally, the solution is just to put up with it. I know that’s not what the internet tells you. But like promises of youthful skin and powerful erections, the solutions offered on the internet to speed up your PC are all scams for the feeble-minded. There is no ‘weird old trick’ that Microsoft doesn’t want you to know about for speeding your PC up. Microsoft is extremely invested in making your PC run as well as possible, and if removing old entries from the Registry made a significant difference, Windows would already do it for you automatically.
You can make your PC run a little faster by upgrading your RAM to the maximum it supports, removing programs from the start-up group (especially your antivirus software) and uninstalling programs you don’t need. But most of the slowdown comes from the inexorable bloating from Windows updates building up over time. If you want a noticeably faster PC, buy or build a new one.
The other thing people complain has got worse over time is the heat output – especially from a laptop. Older laptops run hotter because they are trying to run newer games on older hardware, so the CPU and graphics card are running at full power more of the time. They also have collected some dust on the motherboard and on the fan blades, which interferes with cooling. You can’t do anything about the former, except upgrade, and I’d argue that you shouldn’t do anything about the latter either. I have never dismantled a laptop and felt that things were in better shape afterwards.
If your laptop is running hotter than it used to, try not to use it on the bed, where the duvet is going to block the vents, and hope that the graphics card doesn’t blow before it comes time to upgrade. Remember, heat by itself isn’t really a problem.
4. RANDOM WEIRDNESS
“Sometimes it just freaks out for no reason at all”
There are three kinds of random fault: loose connections, overheating and memory errors. You can tell the difference quite easily. If it freaks when you pick it up, it’s a loose connection: some component or wire internally isn’t quite making the connection it’s supposed to be, or at least isn’t doing it reliably.
If it freaks when you have been watching movies or playing games for a while, perhaps accompanied by overly enthusiastic fan noise, it’s overheating. Everything else is a memory glitch. You can fix memory glitches by replacing your RAM and the other two kinds usually can’t be fixed, so you should just replace the RAM anyway, in case you were wrong about which kind you have.
Random weirdness that happens only extremely occasionally isn’t worth doing anything about. For instance, if my PC reboots itself spontaneously once a week, I would rather take a few calming breaths and get on with my life than waste several days hunting down a fault that is extremely hard, if indeed possible, to reliably reproduce.
5. OMINOUS PORTENTS
“I’m sure I’m infected”
When people come to me for computer advice, I have learned to listen to the symptoms, not the diagnosis. Some people are convinced that their PC is constantly under attack and see every unexplained behaviour or error message as evidence of a virus infection or a hacker. If you are one of those people then stop it! Provided that Windows is updating automatically and you have changed the admin password on your broadband router from the factory default, avoiding viruses and hacking is mostly a question of not being an idiot when you click links.
If your browser home page has changed by itself, or you can’t open google.com, then you’ve probably got a browser hijack. This is malware, but it isn’t a virus and it isn’t Ebola. Download the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool and be done with it.
BONUS CATEGORY - RAINBOW CHASING
“I just want to try out the latest cool thing”
A PC is like a character in an MMO. When you start at level 1, you fight wolves and gradually you upgrade your equipment and can take on several wolves at once. But no matter how powerful you become, there will always be new gear you could get, and Chromium Ultra-wolf Den Mothers that you could be fighting. Rainbowchasing is when you make life hard for yourself by trying to fix problems that don’t exist. Overclocking your PC, just to get a bigger number in your benchmarking tool, say; or configuring a RAID0 array of disks, when hard disk performance isn’t even a bottleneck for you. A lot of “What’s the best way to upgrade?” type of questions are examples of Rainbow Chasing.
Upgrading is generally a good thing but there are two pitfalls you need to watch for. Don’t upgrade your PC for the sake of it. You should upgrade so that you can run new software that exists now, not so that you’ll be ready for any new software that might come along in the future. You can’t tell how long it will be before something comes along that you need new hardware for – and by the time it does, your upgrade might not be graded far enough up. Secondly, you need to know when to upgrade the components and when to upgrade the PC.
Here’s what I do. With every other version of Windows, I will buy a new desktop or laptop with that version preinstalled. On the odd-numbered releases of Windows, I’ll just upgrade the existing machine. When I buy a PC, I’ll specify one notch above the current mid-range for CPU and graphics card, and get the maximum RAM that Windows currently supports. I normally get whatever the default hard disk size is at the time. After a year, if I want to run an application that needs more RAM or a faster graphics card, I’ll upgrade. If it needs a faster CPU, I’ll get a whole new PC. I have never run out of disk space on any PC ever.
A very common question for a Tech Guru is “Which new graphics card/laptop/motherboard do you recommend?” And the correct answer is to look at the latest slew of supertests in the excellent magazine you’re holding right now. We regularly cover graphics cards, motherboards, CPUs and look at full systems and laptops once a year. This leaves the question of how much you should pay for such things. The right price for a graphics card is £200. For a laptop, it’s £400 for a basic machine and £1,000 for a fancy one. For a motherboard it’s £100, although the only reason to upgrade the motherboard is when upgrade the processor as well and if you are doing that, you may as well look at a whole new machine - you’ll get a much better PC, with less hassle.
HELPING OTHERS
As a Tech Guru, you have to do more than diagnose the problem. You must also consider who is asking for your help and choose the best solution. By that, I mean the best solution for you.
For family members, you need the quickest resolution, because they will come back to haunt you if you don’t fix it on the first try. Swapping RAM modules around is a quick and safe thing to try, but reformatting and reinstalling Windows will be like cutting the head off a hydra: you may fix the original problem but three more will grow in its place, as you try to restore all the drivers for their 15-year-old printers and off-brand sound cards.
With friends and neighbours you are much less invested, so wherever possible you should recommend new kit. My experience is that this is generally what they are hoping you will do anyway; your pronouncement will be used as bargaining leverage with their spouses or parents, to justify a big spend. If you try and save them money, they will resent you for it and the next time their PC breaks, you’ll be blamed for not euthanising it last time.
If you are fixing computers for customers, your overriding priority is to safeguard their data. Before you so much as open Device Manager, you should clone their entire hard disk onto a removable drive of your own. This will feel like a ridiculous precaution every single time, until you actually need it, whereupon it will feel like the best advice anyone has ever given you. Remember: if data is lost for any reason while you are sat in front of the keyboard, you will be blamed. Cloned hard disks are like save points: you can afford to be more adventurous, if you know you can hit F9 and reload.
Is that all? Are you really a Tech Guru now? Of course you are! Gurus don’t have all the answers, they just know how to remain calm under fire while they look for one. They know where to look and they know the answer when they see it. You can do all these things, and all that you need now is the self-confidence to carry it off. If anyone tries to call you an expert, by all means deny it. But if they call you a guru, just smile knowingly and humbly.
AND SOME INFORMATION
How to Google
Not everything on the internet is true
Knowing the right answer isn’t an especially useful skill. Being able to find the right answer is much more valuable and recognising the right answer when you come across it, is even better. ‘Google-fu’ is a martial art that gets better with practice, but here are some quick tips to help you sharpen your searches.
Don’t Google the question, Google the answer. “watch dogs crashes randomly” will give you dozens of forum posts from complaining gamers, but the answers will mostly be a mixture of bland boilerplate advice, requests for detailed crash logs, and suggestions of things to try, with replies saying that this didn’t help. Instead, Google “watch dogs patch notes” and you can quickly skim the list of bug fixes to see if any of them addresses your problem.
Ignore search results that are YouTube videos. These are almost always just a collection of suggestions culled from other forums but a video is much harder to skim quickly and the comments section offers very poor feedback to help you decide whether any of the fixes actually work.
Avoid slideshows too. “8 tips for getting Watch_Dogs running smoothly” is just a way for commercial sites to generate page views. Six of those tips will be generic things like “upgrade your RAM” and “install the latest drivers” and the other two won’t apply to you.
Use the wisdom of the crowds. Don’t look for a single forum post with a definitive “right” answer – skim all the sites on the first page or two of the search results and look for common patterns. If the same fix is confirmed on several different sites, it’s much more likely to be reliable.
Know which sites to trust. Search results from stackexchange.com are particularly valuable because they use a rigorous voting system for the answers. Game developer forums and answers.microsoft.com are the next tier down. Sites like answers.yahoo.com and answers.com are garbage.
Avoiding the experts
How to avoid being fobbed off and brow-beaten by the well-meaning clueless
The guy in the shop is not a computer expert; he’s just someone with good interpersonal skills who knows his way around the basics. If your mum wants to set up her Gmail account in Windows Live Mail, he can help. If you come to him with your weird Blue Screen error, you’ll be given some misleading flannel and then steered towards a sale.
The woman in the call centre is not a computer expert, either. She’s working from a troubleshooting flowchart of simple solutions to the most common problems. Her goal is to get rid of you as quickly as possible, so she can keep her call stats up. These are not bad people, they just aren’t the droids you’re looking for.
The truth is that there aren’t really any experts anywhere. There are just people who have come across the same problem as you, and people who haven’t and are guessing loudly. To be a Tech Guru you need to start filtering out this noise. The only reason for visiting a computer shop is to see if you like the keyboard action on a specific laptop. The only reason for ringing a customer support line is for billing enquiries and refunds, or for problems with your broadband connection. Everything else you will fix for yourself, armed only with the internet.
Online is actually the only place you are likely to come across honest answers. In the real world the people who know them are tucked away doing well-paid jobs far away from grubby customers. But online you can get their help for free. Don’t waste time soliciting it directly though; just skim the forums for similar questions and triangulate the suggestions from the most well-informed replies. If your problem is common enough, someone else will already have asked. If it isn’t, then you won’t find the answer by posting.
Learn to program
It’s like Pilates for your brain
Programming is an extremely helpful skill for a Tech Guru. Lots of command line operations become easier if you know a little programming, particularly in Linux – but much more importantly, it teaches you what a computer really is.
Programmers are like Neo: they don’t see files and icons, they see resource handles. Memory isn’t just a quantity, like the fuel in your tank; it’s a collection of discrete integers and floats and strings. When you understand how the house is built, you’ll know which walls you can safely remove and which will bring the ceiling down on your head.
Programming means debugging, and the mindset you need to track down a tricky bug is exactly the same as the one you need to diagnose every other computer problem. Programming is like classical music theory for computer troubleshooting. You can teach yourself to strum some chords without it, but you won’t become a great musician that way.
As soon as you can write a simple program, more complicated programs lose their mystique. And if you can write even a modestly useful app or a mod for a game, then your computer itself will be demystified to a degree that is impossible to overstate. Programming is such an incredibly useful skill that it should be compulsory for all five-year-olds, never mind aspiring Tech Gurus.
Happily, programming is easier to learn now than ever. Python is a good language to learn first – it’s a widely used, serious language, but it is designed to be quite readable and simple.
You can learn the basics for free in a few weekends at developers.google.com/edu/python and learnpythonthehardway.org. Don’t be put off by the ‘hard way’ part; if you can complete a sudoku puzzle or Professor Layton and the Curious Village, you can learn Python too.
What should happen
Understand a normal boot sequence to recognise anomalies
When your PC is switched off but still plugged into the mains (or laptop battery), the motherboard still receives power on the 5-volt standby rail. This provides power to the circuitry that monitors the power button.
Pressing this button signals the motherboard to tell the power supply (PSU) to fire up properly and also pulls the voltage to 0V on the reset pin for the CPU. This puts the CPU into a known start state, with default values loaded into all the registers, and sets the instruction pointer to the start address of the BIOS.
Between 0.1 and 0.5 seconds later, the voltages from the PSU have stabilised and it signals this by putting +5V on the Power Good line (pin 8 of the ATX connector). The tells the motherboard to release the reset line, which allows it to return to +5V.
The CPU now begins executing the Power On Self Test (POST) in the BIOS or UEFI code. This initialises the RAM and the PCI bus. If there is a problem at this stage you’ll receive a series of beeps to indicate the problem; a single beep indicates a pass, and control then passes to the video card, which executes its own video BIOS initialisation routine. Once the video subsystem is working, control comes back to the BIOS or UEFI and you’ll either see the summary screen, or just a pretty splash screen.
While this is displayed, each drive is checked in turn until it finds a bootable one. Control passes to the boot loader program stored on this disk, which copies the Windows kernel and basic drivers into RAM. After that the Windows logo appears, the boot loader copies the registry into RAM and loads the remaining drivers.