(Actually, the UAC is covered in Chapter 8, but that one drives everyone nuts.)
Troubleshooting is the act of figuring out what??™s wrong with a program or a
piece of hardware, and then fixing it. It used to be that we had error messages
to help us, but Microsoft got rid of most of them in Windows Vista;
turns out, they weren??™t that helpful anyway. Now, when something breaks,
it simply stops working.
Now, if you remember only two pearls of wisdom from this chapter, let
them be these:
??? 99% of all computer problems are solved by rebooting. (Restart Windows,
turn it off and then back on, press your PC??™s reset button,
whatever.)
??? Insanity can be defined as repeating the same actions over and over
again, expecting different results. (Or, worse: repeating the same actions
over and over again, knowing that you??™ll never get different results.)
Troubleshooting | 275
Troubleshooting
Naturally, a corollary to these principles is that rebooting repeatedly will get
you nowhere. Herein lies the rub: what do you do during that remaining 1%
of the time when rebooting the first time doesn??™t help?
Unfortunately, troubleshooting a Windows PC involves more than just
whining about it. One of the first things you need to do to solve a problem is
to find the right words to describe the problem; you??™d be surprised at how
many people start with something like ???it doesn??™t work.??? OK, what precisely
is it that doesn??™t work? Did you get an error message? Is there smoke
billowing out of the vents? Or did your program simply not do what you
expected it to?
Here??™s a short checklist of questions to ask yourself to get you??”or rather,
your PC??”on the road to recovery:
Is this an isolated incident, or does this problem occur every time?
As much as Microsoft will deny it, crashing is a fact of life on a Windows
system, even when you??™re using Windows Vista (although some
clowns will swear up and down that their systems are ???rock-solid???).
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