Troubleshooting Techniques: Troubleshooting a Computer | Tech, No Babel

Transcript:On today’s technobabble troubleshooting your computer this is a them as short the and graphic you entry now you all I will another episode don’t babble… The show were we that video and graphic design in the church by names Paul Alan Clifford on your host publicly ask your question suggested that below the video LP listening to the audio there’s no video to leave a comment underneath so just head on over to Trinity digital media.com/T in the short for tech no babble and there you can find one of the recent comments one of the recent shows and leave your comments below so we’re wrapping up a series on troubleshooting and it occurred to me this afternoon as I was thinking about it that I really haven’t talked about computers and computers our special now a lot of other things either work or did they don’t work you know if you’ve got an XLR cable either working or it’s not working you don’t reboot the XLR cable you don’t install an update on the XLR cable either works or it doesn’t now you can fix it if it’s broken a lot of times but it’s not as complex as a computer and in fact as I’m recording this Apple released the latest version of their operating system OS 10.0 why then El Capitan and that contributed to what those thinking as well so let’s talk about this real quick let’s say you’ve got a problem with your computer it’s kind of a joke but there’s a reason they this is the way that it is you always want to start by rebooting your computer now this is happened to me several times where I’ve had what I thought was a hardware failure you know a camera wouldn’t work a USB WebCam may be the audio wasn’t working right or the trackpad wouldn’t work or everything was just locked up and so I just rebooted now this is can be the same whether you’re on what makes a PC or a Mac Windows brother or Mac or even if you’re on a Cronbach that it’s certainly the case that sometimes the software gets a little buggy until you rebooted and he started everything fresh from scratch and all lock all the sudden the hardware failure I had is it a failure anymore it’s just problem than it needed to be rebooted this happen to me very recently I had a ST card that just refuse to be read by the computer and I’ve had this happen before and sometimes you know the copper gets a little oxidizing agent scratch it with your fingernail and then it works now in my tricks worked so it just occurred to me right before I gave up on the card by the way that’s the card that I’m recording this on right before I gave up on the card I decided that I’d reboot the computer guess what started working so that’s one thing you need to consider also consider have you installed in the new software because sometimes software one piece of software that you don’t think has anything to do with it will interact in odd ways with another piece of software so sometimes it’s a new driver that’s installed by the new software that may be worn even thinking about if you’re on Windows maybe it’s a DLL file that God corrupted or updated or something like that sometimes there are little bitty pieces of software that are updated by a larger piece of software and maybe a third piece of software the one you were using before is dependent on that so consider what software has been updated recently this happened to me again with ProPresenter ProPresenter five probably about a year ago I went through everything I can think of checked on the forums and then it occurred to me way it worked last Tuesday it didn’t work this Tuesday in between then what did I install it turns out I installed some software that I didn’t think had anything to do with anything but as soon as I uninstalled it all the sudden ProPresenter starts working again you that’s the way that it is sometimes next consider could you have a virus or some malware or some sort of something and they is running in the background hidden that’s causing problems this happened will Windows is famous for this but it also happens with other software as well so it is possible to get a virus on a Mac it’s harder but it is possible it is possible to get malware on a Mac or even on when makes harder but still possible so I want you to consider is that a possibility so run some diagnostics on it like that help you could be having instead of software problems you could be having hardware problems so all the normal troubleshooting rules apply you know if you got a WebCam with the USB extension cable on it it might be the WebCam but it might be the USB extension cable might be the USB port so test all the hardware in the simplest configuration shortly should do everything we can that we’ve talked about in the past about troubleshooting hardware also look and this is something that I’ve seen more than once look for the problem with power now despite the fact that it the vast majority of homes are alternating current AC computers actually run on DC so to get that they have power supplies that turned the AC into DC and sometimes those power supplies can get a little week if that’s the case that instead of putting out the but say it’s 400 W power supply just throw that out so let’s say instead of on the desktop computer but Satan served using of throwing out 400 W it’s throwing out like 200 computer might start up everything might seem okay until you use your optical drive and then you have problems so it is possible that you could run into a situation where it’s actually the power supply starting to go south let’s also talk about hard drives more more nowadays were seeing solid-state drives and solid-state drives they are less susceptible to the same type of failures as spinning drives spinning drives when I work in tech support back in the day we used to say it’s not if your hard drive is going to fail it’s when you the hard drive is going to fail so spinning drives quite often you’ll get three years out of them without any difficulty but just consider if you’ve had a spinning dryer for four years five years A.B. it’s an archive drive you don’t access very often I might be worth looking at and it might be worth making sure you got another copy of that data now for solid-state drives they tend to work to a point now there will come a time in the future were word in a start seeing solid-state drives fail that’s because they only have a finite amount of rights on the though you can read a whole lot off your solid-state drive for you can only rewrite to it so many times so it’s possible that in the future you’re going to see a problem with the solid-state drive were just starts going south so keep that in mind now how do you check drive to see if it’s starting to go first off if you’re starting to have problems with the drive consider that maybe it’s starting to go if if you start to suspect that maybe it is starting to go the first thing I would do is I would run a utility on it on the Mac its disk utility but there are plenty on Windows plenty on Olympics that can analyze the drive and say tell you if there are problems with it and if you start to see problems start to consider replacing the drive but there are also other things they can go wrong with spinning drives they have such tight tolerances that some relatively minor problems can cause problems with spinning drives so consider those so I hope that that give you just a taste of some of the complications he can have with computers if you like this content you’d probably like my email newsletter so head on over to TrinityDigitalMedia.com/gifts CIF TS and there you can pick up a churchtechcast of your choice along with a free subscription to Yuri to my email newsletter and you’d probably like to check out what I have at my store including my brand-new community Church you that’s located at churchtechyou.com C H U R C H T E C H U.com and that day is a community of people that are all learning about church tech I’m just now getting started and I’d love for you to join me the next time this is Paul Alan Clifford with TrinityDigitalMedia.com go out and change eternity