STFU && RTFM

As a support technician, I have often needed to see how a problem occurs, or show someone how to do something, but the person I need info from, or need to teach, is not available so that it can be done face to face, or over the phone.
 
A lot of my users are getting better at using screendumps, but the screendumps have one major drawback; they are static. They don’t show any sort of detail as to what happens between dumps. The same is true when I create a tutorial for my user; they simply don’t always see every step.
 
Problem Step Recorder to the rescue. By typing psr.exe in the search box in the Start menu and hitting Enter, PSR is started. From here, simply click “Start Record”, and go through the steps in the resolution or problem.
 

 
PSR is simple and efficient, and will be especially helpful to those of us who, from time to time, create tutorials and the like.

An old joke says that there are three kinds of lies; black lies, white lies and the internal polling data of political parties. The latter example is typically statistics, and while statistics can be presented in such a way as to prove almost anything, raw, unprocessed statistics are a great tool.
 
One of my habits when troubleshooting troubles is to have a look at the event viewer. While event viewer allows you to see specific events, it can sometimes be difficult to see trends. In Windows XP, we don’t really have a choice, we’ll have to look through the data, and parse it ourselves.
 
Enter Windows Vista, and Windows Reliability Monitor. As the screendump below shows, it will show you, as a graph, when things have started to deteriorate. You can look through the history, and see on what days there have been many errors. It also gives you a reliability index rating, from 10 to 1 (Ten being very good, 1 being exceedingly bad. Coupled with event viewer logs, Reliability Monitor makes it that much easier to read logs, and solve problems.
 

Click the image to see the full size version

Working in IT, I often have people ask me about issues they are having with their computer. Now, while I’m happy to help out, I often find that the problems I solve for them are problems they could have solved themselves. Mitch Tulloch, a Microsoft MVP and lead author of the just-published Windows 7 Resource Kit (Microsoft Press, 2010; ISBN: 9780735627000; 1760 pages), has created a short e-book called “What You Can Do Before You Call Tech Support.” Here are the opening paragraphs:
 

Your sound card has stopped working, your computer seems sluggish, the network is down, your hard drive is clicking, you can’t view a website, your monitor is hard to read, your new webcam isn’t working, your favorite program won’t run, and a funny burning smell is coming from your computer. What can you do on your own to try to troubleshoot the issue before you pick up the phone to call tech support?
 
If you’re running Windows 7, quite a lot. Microsoft has included a lot of self-support tools in Windows 7 that you can try using before you seek the help of others, and we’ll examine these in a moment. Then there are the tools you were born with—your five senses (see, hear, smell, taste, touch) and most importantly your brain. And by brain I’m including your memory, experience, and capacity for logical reasoning. Finally, there is ancient and sacred lore passed on in secret from Master to Disciple over the millennia. We’ll see shortly how your brain, your senses, and the secrets of the Wise Ones can be very helpful for troubleshooting computer problems. But first let’s look at what troubleshooting tools are built into Windows 7.

 
You can download the e-book in XPS format here and in PDF format here. Enjoy!

The number one biggest error many techs make when diagnosing problems for users, be it on the phone or on site, is going the complicated route. There is a reason why most ISPs have a script for their 1st tier techs to follow, to make sure that the basic errors have been corrected.
 
While I was an apprentice, I was called out to solve a print problem for a user. The user had a printer connected to her computer with a USB cable, and all the cables were connected. The printer in question didn’t have much in terms of diagnostic lights and such.
 
I head out to the user, and start troubleshooting. I try everything I can think of; print spooler, drivers, ports etc., and find myself no nearer to a solution half an hour later. Then I decide to check the back of the printer…
 
Sure enough, the power switch in the back had been toggled, probably by the cleaning staff.
 
The point of my story is that had I checked basic stuff first, that half hour hadn’t been wasted. The moral: Keep It Simple, Stupid

I love using command line tools, especially for troubleshooting networking. There are two simple commands you need to know; ipconfig and ping. Here’s a simple guide to finding where the problem :
 

1. Open the command line by opening the “run” dialog box, entering cmd and clicking OK
2. Ensure that the TCP/IP service is running by pinging the loopback address like so: ping 128.0.0.1
3. Run the ipconfig command, which should give you information something like this:

IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.100
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1

4. If your address is not an APIPA address, ping your IP-address.
5. Ping the default gateway
6. Ping www.iana.org
7. Ping the website or server you are trying to reach

 
If any of the above tests fail, you’ve found where the problem is.