Troubleshooting Basics

Troubleshooting Basics
In this video from ITFreeTraining, I will look at some basic troubleshooting techniques. CompTIA has their own troubleshooting model, which I will look at in a later video. For this video, I will just give an introduction to basic troubleshooting techniques.

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Basic IT Troubleshooting
0:15 To understand the basics of troubleshooting, let’s start with a joke which explains all the basic principles of IT troubleshooting. Consider that you have a car with a manager, an engineer and an IT technician all in the vehicle. The vehicle travels down a hill and the brakes fail. The vehicle travels at speed off the road and almost falls off a cliff.

Everyone gets out of the vehicle and are thankful that they are still alive after almost falling off the cliff. They all urgently need to get to a meeting in the city on the future of free training, so they need to get the car fixed and get on their way as soon as possible.

The manager says, “We need to have a series of meetings, work out a plan and a strategy. We next need to implement the strategy and then have further meetings to work out if the strategy was effective.”

The engineer says, “That is going to take too long and that never worked before. What needs to happen is that I need to get some tools and get under the car and fix the problem.”

The IT technician just laughs. “You’re both wrong. What we need to do is push the car back up the hill, roll the car back down the hill and see if it happens again.”

You can start to understand the basics of IT troubleshooting. One of the first questions asked is, can you replicate the problem? If you can’t, there is no problem to fix. Now you can understand why so many IT technicians will say, “have you tried turning it off and on again?” If you turn it off and on again and the problem goes away, there is nothing to solve.

Just for legal reasons, if the brakes on your car ever fail, please get them fixed ̶ don’t push the car up the hill and see if it happens again!

Let’s now have a look at what to do when turning the computer off and on again does not work.

Cause/Symptom/Consequence
2:02 There are many different ways to troubleshoot computer problems. One may work better in some cases; others may work better in other cases. Generally speaking, when a problem occurs, there is generally something that caused it.

In this example, we will consider that the hard disk is failing. The hard disk is sometimes not reading and writing data correctly. In computers, generally there is only one thing causing the problem and it is a matter of treating it like a logical problem to find out what it is. Find the cause, fix it or replace it and the problem goes away. In some cases, there will be multiple causes, but this is rare. For example, I once had a laser printer that was not working correctly. It had two faulty parts which needed to be replaced for it to start working again. I replaced one thinking this would fix it. When it did not, I removed the part and replaced the other part which again did not fix the problem. It took a while for me to work out that both parts were faulty. This is rare in computers, as generally there is only the one cause.

Description to long for YouTube. Please see the following link for the rest of the description http://itfreetraining.com/ap/1e10

References
“The Official CompTIA A+ Core Study Guide (Exam 220-1001)” Chapter 3 Position 14936-15575
“CompTIA A+ Certification exam guide. Tenth edition” Page 18
“Troubleshooting” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trouble...
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Credits
Trainer: Austin Mason http://ITFreeTraining.com
Voice Talent: HP Lewis http://hplewis.com
Quality Assurance: Brett Batson http://www.pbb-proofreading.uk