A Tech’s Secret Weapon
Posted on August 20, 2004
Filed Under Internet |
With the multitude of hardware configurations available and a plethora of software, troubleshooting computer problems can be a daunting task. An effective technician won’t necessarily have the immediate answer to every situation he or she comes across but will know where to begin to find those answers.
A client recently presented me with a problem with Outlook Express that I had never come across before. When she tried to delete an email from her inbox, nothing would happen. There were no errors and the email simply wouldn’t delete. Only when she closed Outlook Express was there anything to help troubleshoot – an error message that said that her hard drive was full.
She however had plenty of space on her hard drive. Possibly OE was misreading the free space because of a disk error but a scan reported that everything was fine with the drive. So how do you find a solution to such an arcane problem?
The great thing about working with computers is the wealth of information available by using the computer itself. A few carefully worded searches on Google revealed that when the OE program file folders.dbx becomes corrupted, the exact symptoms I was seeing can occur. Even better, the file can simply be deleted and the next time OE is run, it will automatically recreate it.
Rather than delete the file I took the more cautious approach and renamed it. I opened OE and was able to delete mail and when it closed down, there were no more error messages. Another look in the OE program folder showed that folders.dbx had in fact been recreated so I went ahead and deleted the file I had previously renamed.
Often a search for the exact error message can yield a quick hint to the answer of a problem if not the answer itself. To narrow the search down even more, the error message can be typed into the search engine enclosed in quotes. For example “this program has performed an illegal operation” enclosed in quotes will pull up more exact matches than it would without the quotes. Quotes tell the search engine to search for the entire phrase rather than just the individual words contained in it.
Another great tool is the use of the ‘+’ and ‘-‘ signs. The ‘+’ sign tells the search engine to find web pages with the search phrase plus any words following the ‘+’ sign. For example ‘elephants +pink’ will find any web pages with the word ‘elephant’ plus the word ‘pink’. ‘+’ is the default in any search for more than one word so it typically isn’t used.
The ‘-‘ sign on the other hand can be very useful. If you’re like me and enjoy the old Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns and want to know more about the genre, a search for ‘spaghetti’ is going to turn up a lot of results for spaghetti sauce rather than westerns. Try typing ‘spaghetti –sauce’ however and now the search engine will know that you want results for spaghetti that do not include sauce. Of course you could just search for ‘spaghetti westerns’ but the minus sign can be used to eliminate unwanted results.
Internet search engines can be an invaluable tool for troubleshooting computer problems. Of course if your interests lie in old Clint Eastwood movies or even pink elephants, well you’re in luck too!
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