We all need help in different ways. The Internet has lots of training courses we can tap into and learn new skills. Some are free (or rather ad supported like YouTube) and there are others we have to pay for to gain these new skills or find answers to questions.
Ask the right questions
There are right questions and there are wrong questions.
Wrong questions are generic questions, if your computer doesn’t turn on, the wrong question to ask is “my computer doesn’t turn on, what is wrong with it?”
You need to tell me if it’s a laptop or desktop; PC or Mac. Once I have a make and model number, I can start the process of finding out what’s wrong with it.
Google is your friend
Yes, really… Google is your friend. Provided you are asking the right questions, and are prepared to reword your question until you find one that generates the right answers.
A good example is my brother-in-law’s TV went bad, I searched for the model and found the part that was bad cost more to replace than the TV cost! I then switched tack to see what the problem was that caused the TV to go bad, and it was a single chip. So I googled whether the chip could be replaced easily and sent the board to a repair service who fixed it for about £50, so now he has a working TV.
YouTube is also a friend
Another case is YouTube. It is common that laptops get clogged fans and since every model is different, some are easy to get to through the keyboard whereas others are a total laptop disassembly to clean and reassemble. You only find this out by searching for the manufacturer and model number. Sometimes there isn’t a video so you find one similar and then you have to guess whether it is what you need.
Forums are useful too
Forums are an old fashioned concept for finding information, but they don’t have the churn that social media does. If you use the search feature, you can find content that matches what you need.
If in doubt, you can always ask...
I grew up with computers, in 1983 I was using BBC Micros in school and Sinclair ZX Spectrum at home. I learnt DOS and business programs in 1988. I used Windows 1.0 in college and started on the Internet in 1994.
My first job in the city was technical support for an Internet Service Provider in 1995. I learnt web hosting in 1996 and started my own business in 2006.
If I don’t know something, I ask one of my tech support friends too.
