I tell customers while I am at their houses sometimes that I’m not really sure what exactly is causing the problem just yet, and that I need to do some more troubleshooting to figure out the cause of the icons randomly moving themselves around the desktop, and then sometimes I get a response like “Oh okay, well when you know what the problem is let me know.” Then I also sometimes get a rather different response.. “Yeah! Shoot that trouble!” They mean it literally, they want me to kill the trouble. Simply, they don’t know what exactly troubleshooting is.
Troubleshooting, as defined by Wikipedia, is “a form of problem solving most often applied to repair of failed products or processes. It is a logical, systematic search for the source of a problem so that it can be solved, and so the product or process can be made operational again.”
Perfect! Troubleshooting is what is needed to get the job done the right way the first time, and it normally first involves recreating the issue. Once the issue has been recreated it is time to see what different options could make this happen, for the icons moving all around desktop we obviously have to look for ants inside the monitor, because that is definitely the first problem I would think of.
No of course not! The first thing you want to check for is a running anti-virus and anti-spyware application. If there are neither, or just one of the two, then there might be a virus or some spyware/malware/adware lurking around the bend of each and every sector of your hard drive!
Those are the ants I am truly speaking of. So then we run some Anti-virus or Anti-spyware programs, and get rid of those pesky ants using some e-Raid.
This is just one short idea of what troubleshooting is, lot’s of times it can go on and on and on until you find the perfect solution that has fixed the seemingly perfect problem. It’s good to have your computer guy run troubleshooting techniques, it is almost always the best answer to your problem.
