My Friends Don’t Help me With my Computer Problems!
As you can guess correctly this is not an article purely for networks, but it concerns me for quite some time so i would be more than happy to get some feedback on it.
I am into computers for more than 10 years and i think many of you reading this blog, would be using computers for more than 5 because after all, you can’t say: Hmm computers might seem something good. Let me start using them! And the next day you’ve come upon a specialized networks blog and start reading it:)
So, i was thinking… What’s the problem with today’s computer users?
I’ve come up to this question because it seems that the average person that uses a computer doesn’t have:
- Patience
- Passion to make things happen
- Appetite for knowledge
I can’t say that the above are absolute but a great percentage of users can’t:
- Have something broken on their computer for more than 5 minutes cause it “Disturbs” them.
- Spend more than 10 minutes on a problem. After 10 minutes the problem becomes unsolved and “mission critical” so what they can do is to pick up the phone and call their “geek” friend and ask him/her.
I can accept it, users nowadays aren’t used to be able to control problems with their computer but for god’s shake why when i ask a friend who calls for support:
- What was the error message when the incident happened?
-I don’t know a message popped up.
- What did it say?
- I don’t know, something about an error!
How does that guy want me to help him when i try to find an error that i don’t know what caused it? I will try and do it once, twice, then i’ll act like I don’t know. That’s how the article’s title was created.
The old days of searching through magazines to find commands to solve your problems and read manuals so you can see what’s wrong belong to the past.
I still can remember a period that i used to do 3 formats a day. Installing windows 3.11 messing with settings and then ruining everything and again installing, till i make it work the way i wanted it to work.
I don’t know why this happens maybe it’s the way we live nowadays that demands everything to be fast
Maybe people today think that a computer is a gaming machine, an mp3 player, a home cinema and nothing else, therefore they think that nothing should go wrong and if it does the problem should be solved with just a click.
And to stop whining, i can’t complain about it, this issue has given work to many many it technicians (including me) who can charge a very good amount of money for a problem that could be solved by the same user in 5 minutes. So after all it’s not a bad thing at all. 
I would be very interested to hear your version of the story, your thoughts on the issue and what do you think caused it.
And until our next article… Stay Netralized
As the resident computer geek at work. I get a lot of requests from co-workers to fix personal computer problems.
I find that most of the time the user just ignores the messages they recieve until something has completely broken the computer. For instance, I recently got a computer from a friend who said that they were seeing fake “Buy me to get rid of the spyware on your computer” messages. He didn’t pay attention to the messages and by the time he started getting really annoyed, it was over 2 weeks later. By that time the malware had installed about 10 other malware programs and viruses.
If the friend had said something or at least Googled something earlier, then they would have been able to do something about the problem far before they got infested. I must say that getting rid of 1 malware program is far easier than 10.
I find that most users simply expect the computer to take care of its own problems, and when they see something they don’t expect, they ignore it in the hopes that the little gnomes inside their computer will just fix it for them, or that the issue will simply dissapear on it’s own.
If I was approached or questioned at the first sign of a problem, it would make a diagnosis just that much easier.
The other problem is that users don’t pay attention to their virus subscriptions. If you have a paid subscription that has lapsed, then the anti-virus it useless. In the above case I merely installed a free anti-virus program and was able to head off any damage, but in other cases, the machine is almost beyond saving due to inability to install anything.
I know that this is all a bit off topic, but I think it ties into the whole “Computer user problems”.
[…] again, after getting some feedback from the Computer Problems article, i thought i should write an article about the next big decision you will have to […]