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Brenda: Hello. everyone, and welcome. This is Brenda Hough
and I'll be facilitating today's session, Basic PC Troubleshooting.
Before we dive into the content, let's cover some technical information.
The tool we're using for today's session is ReadyTalk. All the lines are muted
except for the presenter line, but you can use chat to ask questions, share ideas, make comments.
A lot of you have already been chatting, so feel free to use that throughout the session.
We do have time at the end of the session set aside for questions
but please feel free to ask them at any point.
Troubleshooting tips: if something happens on your end, your computer locks up,
you stop hearing us, anything like that, the #1 troubleshooting tip is to close out
and then go back to the email with the registration information and come back in again.
The number 1 troubleshooting tip is to try that.
This session is being recorded, and later today we're going to send out a follow-up email
and that will include a link to the recording. It will include a copy of the slides that we're using today,
and any resources that we talk about, we'll include web links for those, too.
So don't worry about needing to write down web addresses when we talk about resources.
We'll include those in the follow-up email.
With that, let's move on to our content for the day, Basic PC Troubleshooting.
I'm joined today by Joe Olayvar who's at the Washington State Library.
Joe, do you want to say hello?
Joe: Hello. How are you all doing?
Brenda: Glad to have you here. Are you in Olympia, Joe?
Joe: I am. Well, Tumwater, technically, but most people would recognize Olympia.
Brenda: Okay, and then we have a couple of people who won't be talking
but who are helping out in the chat, and that's Stephanie Gerding and then also Sarah Washburn,
both from TechSoup. They're helping out with the chat, so again as you have questions
or comments, feel free to put them there and we'll be watching for those.
This is a TechSoup webinar. If you're interested in learning more about computers,
learning more about technology, TechSoup is a great resource. It's one of the addresses
that I'll share in that follow-up message today. The site has articles, community forum
where people post questions about technology, and if you haven't heard
about the Technology Donation Program, you'll definitely want to explore that.
That's one resource already.
If you haven't been to the TechSoup site in a while, you should check it out.
Recently it underwent a major remodel. That's techsoup.org and again,
don't worry about writing it down. We'll include that in the follow-up message.
There's a special section of TechSoup for libraries, TechSoup for Libraries.
It's focused on libraries and technology and in the follow-up message,
I'll include a link to that section, too.
Today's webinar is one of a series of webinars we're doing in support of the library Edge Initiative.
The Edge Initiative is a coalition of library and government organizations
that are working to develop tools to support libraries in continuously improving
public technology. One of the tools that is being developed is Benchmarks.
They look at things like practices, policies, equipment, staffing.
There are eleven benchmarks, and today's webinar is based on #10, Maintaining Technology.
In the follow-up email, we'll include a link to that, too, good resources to know about,
things that have lots of helpful follow-up information.
With that, I think we're ready to hear a little from Joe.
I'll let you introduce yourself more completely, Joe.
Joe: All right. I'm Joe Olayvar. I'm out of Tumwater, as I said earlier.
I've been doing IT for a number of years, most of it surrounding libraries.
I've been the main support for most of the institutional libraries in the state,
mostly on the west side, though. I have a counterpart of the east side of the state.
But we did, we went everywhere. And then here in Tumwater is the main State Library,
for which I was tech support here, doing desktop and network support for a number of years.
But I am currently with the web development team now, or excuse me, the Tech & Development Team.
And we're here and it brings me to you now. I went out and did some PC troubleshooting classes
for the rural libraries, and recently — well, not recently any more, it was last year —
did one for the whale conference. And so here I am today.
Brenda: Okay, great. Well, we're glad to have you here. Just to reiterate,
today's session is really intended to be basic so those who have little or no experience
troubleshooting a Windows PC. That's what our target audience is for this.
Okay, well, Joe has a number of tips that he's going to share with us, and remember,
feel free to ask questions at any time. Use the chat for that, and we'll be tracking those questions.
With that, we'll go ahead and jump right into the first tip.
Joe: All right. Get familiar with the basic components. That is so true.
If you were working on your car and didn't know what you were working on,
you would be putting an alternator where it shouldn't go and so forth and etcetera.
Same thing here. It's like any piece of machinery. The more you know about it,
the more you can talk with the person, 'cause if you went to a car repair shop,
you'd have an idea of what they were trying to tell you so you can converse
and adequately describe what issues you're having. Same thing with the PC.
On this page, everybody take a look at it. Go through the list.
I know it says if you opened up the PC, three of those items are actually not inside,
and I'm sure you can pick those out pretty easily. But take a look at them and just think about it,
and we're going to come back to it, but I want you to take a look at them first
and just see how many you can identify.
Brenda: Then we'll actually poll you and actually count how many you feel like
if you opened up the computer you could identify. We have the poll.
Give it a couple of minutes for people weighing in there.
Joe: All right.
Brenda: Okay, we'll close the poll in three, two, one.
Joe: Four to six wins.
Brenda: Four to six wins. Yeah. But we have people really all across the board, too.
Some people knew zero to three, and then a lot in four to six.
Okay. So, yeah, I'm curious. It looks like Stephanie posted in the chat
that Tanya said everything except the I/O interface.
Joe: I was going to identify that. That is actually, probably, what you're most familiar with.
You just don't know it by that name. If you go to a computer
and you've ever put one together before, when you plug into the back, that is the I/O interface.
I/O, all that means is simply in and out, inbound/outbound. That's all it really means,
and so we have this nice way of making things look really confusing when they're not.
But yes, there you go. There's a picture of one right there.
If you look at that, most of that stuff is recognizable to you, a place to put your monitor,
hook up your monitor; hook up your USB; hook up your sound, your network; your mouse,
your keyboard. It's all pretty much there and, really, there's not much to it.
When you stop and think about what you're plugging into and most of the cables,
we call them device cables because they connect devices, like your VGA cable is your main one
that's used to hook up a monitor. That will go in — let me find my little blue arrow here — right there.
Hopefully everybody can see that. Most people have hooked up a monitor before,
and that is where you would hook it up. This is your more modern DVI, for more modern monitors,
but you'll still see a lot of this VGA connection.
Calling it a device cable is just a generic way of saying that it hooks up the device.
Other people will call it a VGA cable or a monitor cable, but there you go,
'cause you have your USB cable. They are technically a device cable.
You'll have your other cables to go to, for instance, your optical one here.
It's still a device cable, but it's a fiber cable technically. So those are the things,
if you're talking to somebody in the IT world and you're troubleshooting something,
you can tell them, "My VGA cable doesn't seem to work." When you hook up the monitor,
they might ask you, "Is your VGA cable hooked up?" You can say, "Yes, it is,"
and you'll know what they're talking about. You can identify which areas they are
on your computer and on your monitor.
Brenda: Another one people are asking about is the system board,
and wondering if that's also called a motherboard.
Joe: That is absolutely correct. If you look at it, over here, that is what we were looking at
just a minute ago. That's your I/O. We're looking at a top view of it obviously.
So this would be the back of the computer. Then right here is where your CPU goes.
Now a lot of people consider a CPU, when they talk to it, they say, "My CPU is out,"
and they're actually referring to their desktop or their PC. That is actually incorrect
'cause the CPU is your central processing unit, and that is what most people consider
the brain of the operations for your computer. That is, if you've ever heard of Intel or AMD,
that's what they do. They make CPUs that go into this little spot here.
It's kind of hard to tell in this picture, but there are literally hundreds of little pins that your CPU has,
and they fit specifically into this layout of pin configuration for specific CPUs,
and they lock in and then you put on a thing called a heat sync that goes on top of that,
with a fan usually. It's all to keep the CPU cool because as it works, as it does your work,
it heats up, and when it heats up, it slows down. So if you keep it cool,
that's how you keep your machine operating optimally so that it stays happy.
Kind of like a car, back to the car analogy. If your radiator goes, your car goes. Same thing with this.
You have to keep it cool. A heat sync looks just like a radiator. I mean, if you looked at one
without knowing what it really was, you would think of it as being something that cools something,
just by how it looks.
Brenda: Okay, great. One of the things Joe mentioned to me about the full-day workshops
that he does on this topic, where he actually takes a computer apart with a group,
is how much people enjoy that session and are surprised at how it makes sense.
So a resource that we're going to share with you, because of course we can't actually open a PC
and get in depth with all these things right now, but we're going to be sending some videos
that are from GCF Learn Free, which is just a great resource for learning.
It's great not only for your own learning but when you have other people you're helping,
and they use the PC, there are really good tutorials on a lot of topics.
A couple that we're going to share with you are actually doing that.
It's a video that shows you the inside of the PC and these same parts,
and some of these things that Joe has already talked about, so that will give you a chance
to look at that information, too.
Joe: Okay, and before we move from the slide I just want to point out one item that most people —
this one right here, Item 5, random access memory. Most people know it as RAM or memory.
That is something that will improve your machine best. If you have a machine that's running slow
or just having a hard time when you open up more than one program
it seems to really impact its usability, if you will, this right here, RAM,
is something that will improve your machine.
Let's see. Other things I want to point out is number 4 and number 10, your drives.
The hard drive is basically your file cabinet. That's where all the information that you do,
that's where it goes. It goes onto your hard drive. So if you're talking with anybody in IT
and they ask something about where are you putting something, a file,
if you're looking for something and they ask about it on your hard drive,
that's what they're talking about. If they C:/ drive, that's where your normal operating system is,
and most people only have the C:/ drive. It's synonymous with that, basically.
Your optical drive is your CD player, your DVD player/burner.
The reason I want to point these out is because these are two components that,
unlike the rest of these 1 through 10, they can actually be external as well,
and I'm going to touch on that later on.
Brenda: Joe, maybe I'll ask a couple of the questions that we've received
that fit right here. One question is about the difference between USB 2.0 and USB 3.0.
Joe: Basically, that's speed. Any time, with all the computer upgrades and as computers improve,
everything is surrounding speed. How fast can it go so you can do your thing better?
How much better can it operate so you can see your video games better
and not have any jumpy moves and the graphics are great and all that?
It's all about speed. The same is applied here with your USB. Your standard USB runs at about,
or excuse me, your USB 2.0 runs at about 400 MB. Not that that really means anything,
but your 3.0 is just a step up from that. I want to say it's like 600 MB, somewhere around there.
I forget the exact number, actually, but that's what it is anytime you see anything like that,
where it says USB 2.0 or USB 3.0. Your hard drives, for instance,
they now go by an identifier of SATA. It's a serial type based interface,
and that's for transmitting data. Earlier, a few years ago, there was SATA1, then it was SATA 2,
now it's SATA 3 and it keeps going up and every time you see a number indicator that goes up,
that's what they're talking about. They're talking about the next generation.
This next generation is faster.
Brenda: Okay, great. Then another question is about the fan and the CPU.
I think the question is, if the fan does not work right, can that totally damage the CPU?
Joe: Yes. Most operating systems, though, and most components within the BIOS,
actually that's something we don't need to talk about, but in any case it protects the CPU,
your processor, from overheating on its own, in that when it gets to a certain temperature,
it just simply says "I quit" and your system will shut down. That is to protect the CPU
which is the most vital, critical component on your board. If the fan stops working,
it can no longer cool that CPU. So what you will likely experience first
is that your machine starts running sluggish. You other fans may try to compensate
and start revving up, and things like that. So if you know that the CPU fan has quit,
and we're talking about the fan that actually fits physically on top of the heat sync.
Remember what I was saying earlier. You have, from your system board,
you put on your processor in that little square area, and on top of that goes what's called
the heat sync that looks like a radiator, and on top of that heat sync is a fan,
and that is the CPU fan. That part, when it goes, if it is no longer working and you know that for a fact,
I would highly suggest you shut your machine off and don't run it any more until you get that fixed.
Brenda: Okay. I think there's a great comment in the text chat from Patricia Perry
who said that she learned by, there's a company they contract with for the tech stuff
that she can't take care of, and the guy that they send teaches her by letting her take it apart
and put it back together.
Joe: Wow, how cool is that?!
Brenda: Yeah, that's pretty great, but she has got initiative, too. I had the same experience.
The way that I learned about this was working at a rural library in Minnesota
and having a couple of computers having issues. Tech support would have me on the phone
and would be talking me through it, so I kind of unwillingly had the same introduction to hardware.
Joe: In your scenario, by knowing these components, that really helps
because as the person on the other end of the phone is talking with you,
describing what you need to do, you have a better idea what they're talking about and saying,
or, you know, ask some questions. Is this the thing with the little fins that look like a radiator?
You already know. So when you get to know your components, you're able to converse more fluidly
with the person on the other end of the phone, or whatever, so that you can come to a remedy.
Brenda: So however you learn that, we'll send the videos. So that will be a way to work on that
and then, if you have those opportunities, like Tricia, to have someone
looking over your shoulder or if you're more comfortable, even just look over their shoulder.
I think that's a great way to get more comfortable with what those different components are
and how it all fits together.
Joe: Absolutely.
Brenda: Okay, why don't we go ahead onto our next tip? Tip #2: Task Manager is your friend.
Joe: Yes. Task Manager. It's a native software, program I should say, that comes with Windows.
The one you're looking at here in this example is actually from Windows XP.
To get to it is what the "Ctrl + Alt + Delete" is telling you. If you hold down, starting with the Control key,
then hit your Alt key and your Delete key, you'll get a window that pops up.
Most of you have probably done this before. That is how some people log out.
They'll do that 'cause you can get to your log-out screen. It can also get to your Lock screen,
but within that there should be, depending on where you're at.
Some machines won't let you get into the Task Manager and you'll know it by doing this.
You do the Ctrl+Alt+Delete, one of the buttons is grayed out, the Task Manager button,
that means your IT Department has locked it out so that you cannot get into the Task Manager.
But another way of getting into the Task Manager is, down in the task bar, down in the bottom,
when you open up programs, you know how the programs populate the bottom
and you'll have your Windows and your Power Point or whatever
and they'll all start populating the bottom, that is the task bar area.
If you go into an open area of the task bar, right-click on that,
you'll also have the Task Manager option on that. You'll get a little menu that pops up
and you'll be able to select Task Manager and get to it from there as well.
Brenda: This is something we wanted to see, if this was something that people
are already familiar with, if you use Task Manager.
Joe: A lot of yeses. I like that.
Oh, yeses are way out in front. All right! Vast majority. Awesome!
Brenda: My husband, who is not at all technical, this is one that he…
this is his number 1 troubleshooting tip. He goes to Task Manager.
Joe: It's a good one.
Brenda: It is. Yes. Okay, we'll go ahead and close the poll.
Joe: So we're just going to briefly touch on this. What we have here, as far as the example given,
you'll notice that in the Applications tab is what we're showing here.
This area here, these are all components that are opened by the user.
In other words, if you opened up Word, you opened up Power Point, whatever,
it's all going to show here. Then over here, with the Status, this is what you want to look for.
What we're after here is if you run into a problem with, say, okay, right here this is —
as you can see, this is a screen shot of Brenda's Task Manager.
She opened up, she has a Word document opened. It's a brand new one
and you can tell because it says Document 1. If it was one she had already opened before
and actually saved and has reopened it, it would have a name right here.
It would have your file name on it. But being that it's a new one, let's say she's working on it
and then it quits on her. She can't type. She can't close it.
She goes up and tries to close the little red X on it, and it doesn't work.
One thing you can do is get into Task Manager and find out what the system thinks is happening.
And over here, if it still says it's running, it just means that it's having a difficult time at the current,
and so just wait. If it says "not responding" that means it's having issues.
Still again, it might be worth it to wait. I say that because it's trying to actually fix itself
and if you're doing something that you've worked on for the last two hours,
you don't want to lose any of your work. So sometimes it's good to just let it wait.
Be patient. But then sometimes it's just hung and it's not going to do any better than where it is.
So therefore you go down to the End Task here. Make sure it's highlighted like this one is up here,
but you would highlight this one down here, the Document 1, and do End Task.
What it's going to do is basically the same thing as clicking on this little red X but it's slightly forceful,
I guess you could say. What it's going to do, it's still going to try and save your information,
at least as much as you did from the last auto-save that it did. It's going to try and keep that.
If it cannot, you're going to get to a point where it's going to say, "Do you want to force shut-down?"
You say "yes," and it's pretty much guaranteed that you've lost your work at that point.
If you're able to close this or highlight this and do End Task, and it does actually close down,
chances are you will have saved some of your information, so you won't have lost everything
you did, but at least you'll be able to recover and go on from there.
The Processes tab, the next in line, this one right here, it has everything that's open right now,
all the stuff that's running in the background and all the stuff that you have opened as well.
If you close anything out of there, it's a "kill" switch. It literally, if you were to take this document,
it will show up in this Processes tab right here, if you were to kill it from the Processes tab,
it literally kills it. There is no saving. It just — boom! it's gone.
The other thing in this Processes tab, what you have to be careful of, is there are other programs
in there that are running. If you accidentally kill those, you can mess up where you're at right now.
Chances are if you do a restart, it'll come back but it could make things difficult for you at the time.
The Performance tab is another one. This one here gives the graphic illustration, if you will,
of what's going on. It'll tell you what's going on with your CPU, your RAM, and that's a good one
for if you're doing things and your machine starts running real slow.
You can go to the Performance tab and it gives you literally a bar graph that tells you if your CPU,
your processor, is being tapped out. If it is, you know, that could be happening
like if you have an older machine and you're trying to run the newest suite of Adobe,
Adobe Photo Shop or Creative Suite or something like that, and it's just racking on it.
It's just being really *** your CPU. That and your memory,
the Adobe and Creative Suite programs are very much resource hogs,
so you'll probably see a big hit on your memory as well. So that's a place to go
so you can find out what's happening with your machine. If it's just normal stuff,
if you have a bunch of programs open and it's not so much your CPU that's being tapped,
you'll probably see that your memory is being tapped. In other words,
it's going to have a measurement of how much memory you have on your machine,
and it's going to tell you how much you have left to use. It's going to give you an idea
of whether or not you need to get more memory. If you're going to continue on with
the kind of operation you're doing at that time, if you're working under your normal capacity
and it's not playing friendly with you because the memory issue,
I would suggest you look into getting more memory, and that should help you.
Brenda: Okay. One question we got about Task Manager is, what if it doesn't work?
What if you get to the point where, you know, you talked about ways that you can use Task Manager
to troubleshoot, but what if you can't get Task Manager to work? What do you do at that point?
Joe: Do you mean as in "it's locked down so you can't get to it' won't work kind of thing?
Brenda: Or I think it's not doing the job. You can't even get that to respond.
Joe: Well, you know, that is very true. That is very true. Your End Task on your Applications tab there,
a lot of times you will find that. You'll click on it and you'll think it's not doing anything.
It actually is, and sometimes you just have to have patience and wait.
But really, you're at the point where you only have, the only other option is to log out
and to force it to shut down that way, or to do an actual restart your machine.
Unfortunately, you're at the point where, you know, patience is a virtue. Go get a cup of coffee.
Watch the latest episode of something you missed. But yes, that is very true.
That's obviously from someone who's tried it before and ended up hitting that brick wall.
I have to admit, Task Manager, the End Task Function does sometimes hang as well,
but that is your best bet to try and hopefully save what you've been working on.
Obviously if it's Internet Explorer or something like that, you aren't saving anything there anyway, so.
And that you shouldn't have much trouble with as far as End Tasking.
Brenda: One of the resources that we're going to send out is actually from, this is part of Windows,
Microsoft Windows, and so the Microsoft web site has a pretty in-depth overview of Task Manager
and what all of these different parts are. I realized as you were going through this
that I have certain things I use it for, but there's more that I could be doing.
So thanks for that overview. Shall we go ahead on to number 3?
Joe: Sure.
Brenda: Okay.
Joe: All right, and that pretty much says it all. "No Sounds, No Lights, No Nothin'"
So you've come in, first day or Monday, first day of the week, and you turn your machine on,
and you think it's kicked on and you're waiting. Then you realize there's nothing on the screen,
and there are no lights on your computer. It's not making the usual ***-*** sounds
of the fans kicking up and everything. You can go ahead to the next slide.
This is probably with you begin to think something's really terribly wrong.
Your first inclination is, "Oh, my gosh! Call IT right away." Or call somebody who cares.
What happens most of the time is during the night, someone has come in and done some cleaning
around your cubicle and turned your surge suppressor off.
So everything that's plugged into it won't come on. It's amazing how simple a thing
that your machine will be, or your issue will be when you just start following cables
and you just start thinking, "Well, let's start from Square One."
The first thing to do, as it says: Check the power, the surge suppressor.
Find your power, where it hooks into the back of your computer, run it back
and make sure that it's in a surge suppressor. (That's a hard word for me this morning.)
Your surge suppressor is something you should have, too, I want to point out.
If you do not have one, get one. It's the best thing for preventing your machine from getting fried
when you have power surge, whether it be from lightening or someone hitting a telephone pole
down the road. It helps protect your gear.
In any case, everything should be plugged into your surge suppressor,
your monitor and your computer mostly. So follow it back. If there are other things plugged into that,
see if they come on. If they don't, that's a pretty good indicator that either your surge suppressor
has kicked. In other words, most of them have a fault in there and if they got a power surge
overnight or through the night, they'll kick and then turn itself off.
So there might be a Reset button. So you look for the Reset button and hit that Reset button.
First you turn it off. There should be a switch on it. Turn it off. Find the Reset button.
Hit the Reset button and turn it back on, and if the lamp that was plugged into it now comes on,
then you know you should be able to turn your PC back on.
Follow it back. Swap out the cables. If that doesn't work, it's very, very unlikely
that it's going to be your power cable. I have, out of all these instances like this,
where someone has called up and says "It won't come on." I've gone back and it has always been
either the power or, like the next bullet, it's been the bad processor or, excuse me,
power supply unit. That is almost always the case. It's one of those two things.
I can't remember when it has actually been a cable, a power cable.
But I know that as far as online, you find that it has been, but the reason why that is there
is just to help emphasize how important it is to swap things out.
I'm going to harp on you guys with swapping things out because that is the best troubleshooting tool
you have when it comes to physical things.
As far as that, so you've gone into it. There's no power. Your surge suppressor's on.
You lamp that's plugged into it is working. You still have no power on your computer.
Then, like it says, it's most likely a bad power supply unit or the system board.
At that point you call your IT. It could also be the power switch on your machine.
I have seen that happen before, too, but 90% of the time it's the power supply unit
when you're in this scenario. Something like that, there is a test for it,
but I'm not going to tell you because I don't want anybody getting curly hair when they don't need it.
In any case, the other thing I want to point out, and this is okay, so you've got all this going.
You've got your power supply, excuse me, your computer up and running
but you have nothing on your screen, on your monitor. Your monitor's dead.
Same scenario here. Start looking at the cables, following the cables back,
make sure that your cables are plugged in all the way, your power one first.
If your monitor is not showing anything but your monitor has a light on it showing that it's got power,
make sure that — remember I talked earlier about the VGA cable?
That is your device cable for your monitor. Make sure that is plugged in all the way.
Follow it into the monitor itself. Follow it all the way back into the computer where it's connected.
Make sure that it's securely seated where it's supposed to be.
If all those things check out and you're still not getting a display on your monitor,
it's either one of two things. It's either the monitor itself, or it's the cable.
Start with the easy one. Find yourself a known good-working monitor cable, if you can,
and swap that out. Still nothing? If you can swap out your monitor, swap that out.
You don't always have the luxury of having a working monitor laying around for you to test out
or a VGA cable, the monitor cable. In those cases, you're kind of stuck.
Then you have to either call somebody to come in and look at it, or you call a friend and say,
"Can I borrow your monitor?" Things like that.
What it boils down to is trace your cables. Make sure that everything is connected properly.
Connectivity is everything on these things. Even inside your machine,
there are cables running that connect things. They're plugged into slots inside the computer
onto the system board, the motherboard. All those things, you know things come loose
and sometimes that's all it is. It's just something is loose. So you follow it around.
Plug it back in. Make sure everything's connected. If you've verified all that, power connections,
so forth, etcetera, and you're still not getting anything, unfortunately, it's time to call your IT.
Brenda: Good, but we have a couple of questions in the chat.
One of them, I think Eli made a good point that he had this problem and it turned out
it was actually the outlet that was having issues. So I think, like you said,
your troubleshooting is all about isolating what is it. Which piece is it that's having the issue?
That's what your troubleshooting is about.
Joe: Absolutely correct.
Brenda: What is your opinion on whether or not computers should be turned off every night?
Joe: Way back in the early days, we'll say, it used to be a big deal
because if you turned the machine on and off, it would suffer what was called "chip creak,"
in which your components would heat up and expand and then, as it cooled off, it would shrink,
and then you'd end up with connection problems that are basically unfixable.
You'd have to replace things totally because of that. Nowadays, it's not as bad.
The other thing that used to suffer, like in the early Windows XP days,
you would have problems with the operating system, not really becoming corrupted
but it would have things not aligned. We'll go with that for lack of a better description.
So you would have issues doing things and they would say, "Restart your machine."
And that's why, and it would just simply restart. Everything would get back in alignment,
if you will, and everything would be fine.
Turning off your machine at night, the only real thing you're helping is the power bill.
Nowadays, your components are just fine with turning on and off. It's not a big deal.
Leaving it on is not a big deal. The only thing you're really going to hurt
is probably if your hard drive continues to spin all night, if it's doing something,
there's actual, physical wear there on the gearing. Then your monitor,
that you need to physically turn off so that your display lasts a little longer.
But really, in my opinion, I leave mine on all the time, to be quite honest with you.
Brenda: I think dealing with a dead PC, you introduced us to the troubleshooting process
and then I think you had a couple more examples of being methodical about troubleshooting.
Joe: And here we are, at the next examples.
All right. Mouse or keyboard quit working. Now that, most of the time
you're in the middle of something when this happens to you,
and it's always like the earlier example where you've been working on a particular document
for the last two hours. It's always at the most inopportune time
when your mouse or keyboard quits working. There again, and we're going to cover this
actually when we go a little farther, but there again it's a time to start tracing back points of contact.
What's wrong? And it's going to vary a little bit with them mouse or keyboard in this situation,
because you have two flavors basically. Well, technically you have three flavors.
You have your wired flavor where you have two flavors. In your wired connections,
you have two flavors. You have your PS2 which is your little round one,
with I want to say four pins in it, then you have your USB connection.
The USB connection is your friendly one, if you will, because usually on your mouse and keyboard,
if they quit working, you unplug them, you plug them back in, and that's going to tell you
whether or not it was just communications error with your machine.
That's what happens normally. Your machine has "quit talking with it," if you will.
There's constant communication going on between your components,
and your mouse and your keyboard are no different.
When they're plugged into your machine and you're working on stuff,
they're constantly sending information back to your machine.
Your mouse has your right-click, left-click, and then your keyboard with your lettering —
Oh, yes, I was yakking too much and wasn't paying attention to what slide we're on.
Did you want to go back to the one before that? Sorry 'bout
that. I told you to stop me. I get rambling.
Brenda: We're getting lots of good questions, too, so this is good.
Joe: All right. A patron is working hard to create something and then it quits.
What are your options? What do you think you would do first?
And this isn't an actual poll; this is just to get an idea.
Most would say "Put a sign on the computer and call IT." That's generally what happens here,
and that's very logical. But if you were doing it, think of it as if you were doing it.
What would you do? The first thing you want to do is actually A, save your work.
So we move on. I like that guy. There was just something really cool about him.
Yes, you want to save your work, and the reason I say that is because it may come down to
restarting your machine or doing something like that, in which you have the potential to lose
your work. Chances are you'll be fine, but this is a good idea.
This falls under the pretense of "back up your work," which we're going to step into later on
as well. So you're using your mouse, and your keyboard quit working,
and all you have is mouse function. Your normal procedure is to go up and you can save,
save as if it's a new document, or just click save. If you just click save, it's an existing document.
It'll go back to where it was and it'll save in its current state. If it's a new document and you save,
it'll be a "save as" and you won't be able to type anything.
So what you want to do is note the location where it's being directed to.
You can redirect the location using your mouse by navigating through the screen,
but it's just as easy to know where it's going, just so you can get on with things.
So note the location and note the name of the document, too.
Most likely, if it's a new document, it's going to be Document 1 or something to that description,
and then hit the "save" button.
From that point, if it's your keyboard, keyboards don't always unplug if they're the PS/2 type.
They don't always unplug and plug back in very readily. At this point, not only would you do that,
you would make sure everything is closed down and saved, and log off.
If you have to, do a restart, using your mouse to do that, to bring your keyboard back.
That's obviously after you've checked the connection to make sure that it is indeed seated
properly. If you have to, unplug it and plug it back in.
Sometimes your PS2-type connection will work with a keyboard.
We can probably go on to the next, and the next is using the keyboard.
So the reverse is your mouse quit working and you need to save your work.
If you hold the Alt key, which is the one directly to the left and right of your space bar,
you hold that down and hit F4, it's going to try and close that program that is open.
Whatever program is open, it's going to try and close that.
If it's a program that's had changes made to it, it's going to want to save it.
If it is one that has already been saved prior, it will save it back to where it was before.
If it is a new document, again, note the location. You can navigate it. It's a little bit cumbersome,
but you can navigate to a new location. But here, it should be automatically highlighted
in the proper space for you to name the document. So you can just name the document,
hit "enter" because that should — I say "should" because you may have to tab over
to your Save button — but hit Enter and that should save it to wherever it was,
where you noted to that location.
Going to the next slide, this is the example of the two types of connections we have.
The PS/2, as you see, the green is normally the mouse; the purple is normally the keyboard.
Nowadays you can even have some — back to that I/O interface, if you noticed that one —
I should have pointed it out. That was half green and half blue. Most I/O interfaces
will have either green or, I said blue, green or purple connection on there and so it makes it easy, c
olor-coded. The older ones, they have a little diagram so you know which one is the mouse
and which one is the keyboard.
The PS/2 is a little funky. It doesn't always play good, play friendly with you
as far as unplugging and plugging back in, and expecting it to work.
Sometimes once you lose the connection or the communication between the system
and the piece of hardware, the unplugging and plugging back in doesn't always work
with PS/2. The USB, on the other hand, that almost always works. If that's what the issue is,
if that is simply an issue where it locked its communication,
by unplugging the USB and plugging it back in, it'll almost always renegotiate that communication.
And your computer and your piece of hardware, being the keyboard or the mouse,
will again talk to each other and start playing together.
All right. So we've been through most of this already. Check your connections.
USB, like I said, unplug and reseat. The wireless one is the third one that I mentioned,
or that I did not mention earlier. A lot of times you'll lose connection
and all you have to do is reset the connection, if you will. Most of the time, they'll have a component
that plugs into the computer and then either your keyboard, your mouse, or both
will use that same component. It's a little transceiver type thing, a little antenna, if you will.
On that, oftentimes, it'll be a USB that you plug in on a cable and then you'll have this little piece
that will come up and it'll sit on your desktop. Oftentimes, there's a button on that.
You press that button and you get it to start searching, that's what you're doing.
It's start looking for the frequency that your mouse or your keyboard are on.
Once you press that button, it starts looking for them. So you're giving it something to find,
either your mouse or the keyboard, whichever one isn't working.
There should be a button. It's usually on the bottom of the keyboard,
same way it's usually on the bottom, and it's going to be small, and sometimes it's in a recessed area
so you'll have to use a pencil or something, maybe the tip of a paper clip, to push that button.
What you're doing is resending the signal broadcasting to the transceiver
so that it says, "Oh, I found you" and they reconnect and everything works fine.
The other part of that is sometimes it's the battery. Your battery just simply died.
So you change your batteries out, and then you repeat the steps
of the seeking where you press the little button on your transceiver to get it to look,
and then you press the buttons on your components so that they say, "Hello. I'm here."
Then the talking, the communication goes on and away they go.
Restart your PC. This is the drastic measure part. All right. If you're doing the keyboard,
if your keyboard is the part that is working, hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete and you'll have a —
back to that same window where you'll have a device manager,
your lock screen and all that. There should be a Restart button that you can tab over to,
or Shut Down. This is your last option. Do that and the system will shut down and restart.
If your mouse is the thing that's working, go down to your Start button
and from there navigate over to your Restart. If neither one of those work
because everything is messed up and you don't have either mouse or keyboard,
you want to do the power button thing. This is definitely your last resort,
because this is more or less — I'm going to back that up a little bit.
The quick push. There's a difference between the quick push and the hold.
The quick push, if you push the power button real quick, it should simulate a safe shut-down,
and the safe shut-down is the normal, as if you go to your keyboard and navigate to Shut Down
or Restart. Same thing with the mouse, Shut Down or Restart. What that does,
it's going to see if there's any open components right now, Any documents that are open,
it's going to save those. It's going to try to, anyway. Most of the time, it will just save to its last
recent save point. At that point, you'll go down to, it'll shut down and save.
It will go through its motions and you'll see that it's shutting down.
Once it's all the way shut down, give it a second, then push the button and restart it.
The drastic measure is the hold. Sometimes when you do the quick push,
that puts it into a sleep mode, kind of irritating, kind of pointless in my opinion,
but some machines are set to go into sleep mode when you do a quick push on the button.
If it does go into sleep mode, you'll probably have to wake it up which simply means
push the button again real fast. That'll wake it up. You'll still be in the locked position
where you were. Nothing will work, but you'll have to hold it this time.
So you push the button in and literally hold it for a few seconds,
and your machine will shut down. You'll hear it, and it will all shut down. At that point, you restart it.
In theory, if everything is as it should be, you're good to go.
Your keyboard will work. Your mouse will work. Hopefully you will have saved your work.
You won't be out of anything.
So here we are again. Same thing: swap out hardware. If that didn't work,
you can start looking for hardware that you can have that you know works, swap it out.
You may have to repeat some of the steps, like if it's a PS/2. You plug it back in.
If that doesn't work, you might have to log out, log back in. Hopefully you don't have to restart.
The other thing is the driver may be the issue. It's pretty rare but it has happened,
and that's usually with specials, like your wireless keyboard/mouse or some of your ergonomic ones
that have a lot of extra keys that do tasks that you assign. Those will oftentimes have drivers
that you need on your machine. Sometimes they will go bonkers, and you have to reinstall the driver
or update the driver. If none of that works, we're to the "call IT" part.
It's already almost — I'm yakking too much.
Brenda: No, you're doing well. We've just got one tip left.
Joe: Okay. Connectivity, we've been through that. Lights, power action! That's pretty self-explanatory
now. No lights, it's probably power. If you get the power going, you should have action.
If you don't, call your IT. Be methodical. That's what I'm really trying to stress through all of this.
Swap out the suspects. There you go. When you're at your last wit,
try and swap it out to make sure that your component is indeed bad.
When you run out of those steps, it's time to call your IT.
Sorry I talked so much.
Brenda: That's okay. No, this is great. It looks like it's helping people a lot.
The last tip has to do with the bane of many people's existence and that is printers,
and so we can't have a troubleshooting webinar without talking about printers
and ways to troubleshoot the issues that happen with those.
Joe: Okay. I'm going to give you a quick run-down first on how they work.
Basically, when you press "print," it sends a message to your printer which also has RAM,
which is what we talked about earlier, the memory. It sends the print job into the memory of the printer,
and the printer in turn, it's almost like a computer itself because it has a processor
and it says, "Okay, I'm ready to print. That one is next in line,"
and it takes the information off of that and starts printing.
When that goes bad, it can be either, well, I'm going to stay on what we have here.
Check paper tray. If you don't get a print job, oftentimes you'd be surprised
how many people just think the paper tray is always full. Check that.
The print queue, sometimes someone else printed it. If it's on a network printer,
sometimes someone else has printed something that is corrupt and it hangs up the print queue,
and everybody behind them gets hung up. Or your machine is just hung up.
So you clear the print queue. To get to that, if you're on an XP machine,
you go to your Start button, up to your Printers and Faxes, I believe it's called.
Open that up, find your printer, right-click on it, go to Properties,
and it'll give you a pop-up window that shows you what's in the print queue.
Cancel all those. Try again. If that doesn't work, sometimes there is something wrong
with the printer itself, in the memory. The buffers can hung up.
If you cycle the printer off and on, basically turn it off, wait a second, a few seconds, turn it back on,
it clears those buffers. Try printing again after that.
Sometimes your settings go bonkers. That's a little deep. That goes into your printer properties
and printer preferences. You go into there and start looking in there,
and unless you're kind of used to that, you may not recognize exactly what might be off there,
but the main thing to check on is the drivers on it. Sometimes you have to just simply switch drivers
and then switch them back. That'll do it sometimes. But to verify the settings can be a little iffy
sometimes, to be quite honest, but that is something to look at.
Check connections, like I've been drilling through the whole part.
Connections, connections, connections. Honestly, that has been rarely the case with printer issues,
and that's why it's a little lower on the list actually. These printers, boy, being from the IT
doing desktop support, they are the ones that we spend the most time on.
There you go. Try printing to a different printer, if you have that capability,
just to make sure there's nothing wrong with your print spooler.
And when it comes down to it, if all those don't work, call your IT.
Brenda: Okay. The last slide just has some tips that you wanted to throw in,
and I think they address some of the questions that people have asked, too.
Do you want to go through those quickly, Joe?
Joe: Sure. PC ventilation, like I said earlier, things heat up. They need to breathe.
They need to stay cool to run optimally. Backup critical data,
that was something I mentioned earlier. That, if you can do nothing else with your machine,
at least back up your data. Back up the stuff that you need. If you have to,
like it says in the next bullet, use external hard drives if needed.
Get an external hard drive from wherever, Best Buy, Costco, wherever.
Every now and then, plug that in, all the work that you've done, that you need and want to save,
put that on there. If it's stuff that you periodically change and update,
make sure that the most updated version of it is on your external hard drive.
Listen to your PC. What I mean by that is you'll get to know it. If it's suddenly revving way up,
like I mentioned earlier, your fans revving way up, you've got a problem with your heat dispersion.
It could be simply that it needs a good cleaning. That is most likely the problem, actually.
If your computer is sitting down on the ground, on the floor, it collects more dust
than it would if it were up on the desk. It collects dust. It gathers up in the fins of the heat syncs.
Therefore it cannot cool off as efficiently as it should, so you need to get that cleared out.
And clicking noises, if your hard drive is suddenly making like supersonic Morse code,
if it's starting to do that, your hard drive may be on its way out.
Sometimes hard drives just make noises. So it's kind of hard to tell there,
but that comes back to back up your critical data. If it is starting on its way out,
you'll at least have your critical data.
Brenda: We had a couple of questions about the dust, so I'll just throw them in here.
Is there any way to keep it from collecting, keep the dust down?
Joe: Location is the best thing. Really, no, there isn't. The only thing you can do is try to locate it
in an area where you'll minimize dust coming in.
Brenda: Someone said the computer was making a horrible noise.
They opened it up and could tell it was a fan. They cleaned it but they still had the noise.
Is there anything more they could do?
Joe: Yes, if at all possible, replace the fan. What has most likely happened is that the fan itself
has gone bad. Most of them don't have bearings anymore,
although some of them do. But they're old and the parts wear, and they'll start to warble.
So they won't spin flat, if you will, and so they start making noises.
Brenda: Great, thank you.
Joe: Do you mind if we continue on, or do we need to exit, stage left?
Brenda: Well, I don't know if you've noticed in the chat, but we've been getting many requests
for you to do another webinar for us.
Joe: Awesome. Thank you, guys.
Brenda: Thank you. This has been great. You have done a great job of explaining a lot of things.
Again, remember, we're going to send our resources, too.
Joe has shared some of his favorites, and I have found a bunch, too.
So we'll share those, and they're on different things like using Task Manager,
getting to know the components, basic troubleshooting techniques,
that kind of thing. Hopefully, this kind of inspired you to want to go the next step with all of this.
Joe: I have something to say, one thing real quick. I saw questions go by.
They asked about the Run/CMD/ID configure. I happened to notice that one.
That is a way, if you get into your "run" prompt, and that's if you go Start, Run,
that'll bring up your Run prompt. You type in CMD into that, hit Enter,
and you'll get what's called a command line interface. Type in "IP Config" and hit Enter.
That will give you your IP address. If someone is troubleshooting
and they need to know your IP address, what gateway you're going through and so forth,
it will tell you those little things, if you're talking with somebody in IT.
Brenda: Okay, great. In the screen shot, you have that on there, too,
and one of the follow-up resources that I found was on just simple steps
on how to take a screen shot when you're getting an error message.
Joe: Nice. Yes.
Brenda: That can be so handy when you're talking to IT.
Joe: Yes, that's exactly why it's there, because we need that information to help troubleshoot.
Brenda: Thank you so much, Joe. This has been great.
Thank you, everyone, for the active chat, too. We'll be following up.
We'll take a look at questions that didn't get answered, and we'll work to make sure
they get answered in the follow-up message, too.
We have another the Edge Initiative Benchmark webinars coming up next month
and that one's on Assisted Technology, specifically focused on children with autism
and other developmental differences. You'll hear about "Come on in" which is a program
at the Skokie Public Library in Illinois. You'll see an evaluation form as the webinar ends,
and we'd love it if you take some time to share with us what you thought of this webinar
and also your suggestions for future webinars, too.
We closely look at those, and that's helpful information for us.
Well, that was a fast hour. Thank you so much, Joe, and thank you, everyone
for being here. We'll call it a wrap.