 Hello everyone and welcome. This is Brenda Haug and I will be facilitating today's session, Basic PC Troubleshooting. Before we dive into the content, let's cover some technical information. The tool we are using for today's session is ReadyTalk. And all the lines are muted except for the presenter lines, but you can use chat to ask questions, share ideas, make comments. A lot of you have already been chatting, so feel free to use that throughout the session. We do have time at the end of the session set aside for questions, but please feel free to ask them at any point. Troubleshooting tips, if something happens on your end, your computer locks up, you stop hearing us, anything like that, the number one troubleshooting tip is to sign out or close out, and then go back to the email with the registration information and come back in again. So that's number one troubleshooting tip is to try that. This session is being recorded and later today we are going to send out a follow-up email and that will include a link to the recording. It will include a copy of the slides that we are using today, and any resources that we talk about will include web links for those too. So don't worry about needing to write down web addresses when we talk about resources. We will include those in the follow-up email. Okay, well with that let's move on to our content for the day, Basic PC Troubleshooting. And I am joined today by Joe Olivar who is at the Washington State Library. Joe, do you want to say hello? Are you all doing? Good. Glad to have you here. Are you an Olympia, Joe? I am. Well, Tumwater, technically Tumwater, yeah, but most people would recognize Olympia. Okay. And then we have a couple of people who won't be talking, but who are helping out in the chat, and that's Stephanie Girding, and then also Sarah Washburn, both from TechSoup. They are helping out with the chat. So again as you have questions or comments, feel free to put them there, and we will be watching for those. So this is a TechSoup webinar. And if you are interested in learning more about computers, learning more about technology, TechSoup is a great resource. It is one of the addresses that I will share in that follow-up message today. But the site has articles, a community forum where people post questions about technology. And if you haven't heard of the technology donation program, you will definitely want to explore that. So that is one resource already. And if you haven't been to the TechSoup site in a while, you should check it out. It recently underwent a major remodel, and it looks good. So TechSoup.org, and again don't worry about writing it down. We will include that in the follow-up message. There is a special section of TechSoup that is for libraries, TechSoup for Libraries. And it is focused on libraries and technology, and in the follow-up message I will include a link to that section too. Today's webinar is one of a series of webinars we are doing in support of the Library Edge Initiative. And the Edge Initiative is a coalition of library and government organizations that are working to develop tools to support libraries and continuously improving public technology. And one of the tools that is being developed is benchmarks. And they look at things like practices, policies, equipment, staffing. There are 11 benchmarks, and today's webinar is based on number 10, maintaining technology. And in the follow-up email we will include a link to that too. So some good resources to know about things that have lots of helpful follow-up information. But with that I think we are ready to hear a little from Joe. Let's you introduce yourself more completely Joe. All right. I'm Joe Olivaar. I'm out of Tomwater as I said earlier. I've been doing IT for a number of years, most of it surrounding libraries. I did it in main support for all the institutional libraries in the state, mostly on the west side though. I had a counterpart on the east side of the state. But we went everywhere. And here in Tomwater is the main state library in which I was tech support here doing desktop and network support for a number of years. But I am currently with the web development team now, or excuse me, the tech development team. And we are here and it brings me to you now. I went out and did some PC troubleshooting classes for the rural libraries. And recently, well not recently anymore, it was last year, did one for the whale conference. And so here I am today. Okay great. Well we are glad to have you here. And just to reiterate, today's session is really intended to be basic, so those who have little to no experience troubleshooting a Windows PC. That's what our target audience is for this. Okay, well Joe has a number of tips that he is going to share with us. And remember, feel free to ask questions at any time use the chat for that. And we will be tracking those questions. And with that, shall we go ahead and jump right into the first tip? All right. Get familiar with the basic components. That is so true. If you were working on your car and didn't know what you were working on, you would be putting an alternator where it shouldn't go and so forth and etc. Same thing here. It's like any piece of machinery. The more you know about it, the more you can talk with the person. If you went to a car repair shop, you have an idea of what they are trying to tell you so you can converse and adequately describe what issues you are having. Same thing with the PC. So on this page, everybody take a look at it. See, go through the list. And I know it says if you opened up the PC, three of those items are actually not inside. And I'm sure you can pick those up pretty easily. But take a look at them. Just think about it, and we are going to come back to it. But I want you to take a look at them first and just see how many you can identify. And then we will actually poll you. So actually count how many you feel like if you opened up the computer you could identify. And we have a poll. I will give you just a couple of minutes. I see people weighing in there. Okay, close the poll in 3, 2, 1. So 4-6 wins. 4-6 wins, yeah. But we have people really all across the board too. Some people who feel more 0-3 and then a lot in 4-6. Okay, so yeah, I'm curious. It looks like Stephanie posted in the chat that Tanya said everything except the I-O interface. I was going to identify that. That is actually probably what you are most familiar with. You just don't know it by that name. If you go to a computer and you've ever put one together before, when you plug into the back, that is the I-O interface. I-O, all that means is simply in and out, outbound. That's all it really means. And so we have this nice way of making things look really confusing when they are not. But yeah, there you go. There is a picture of one right there. So if you look at that, most of that stuff is recognizable to you. Place to put your monitor, hook up your monitor, hook up your USB, hook up your sound, your network, your mouse or your keyboard. It's all pretty much there. And really there is not much to it when you stop and think about what you are plugging into. And most of the cables, and we will call them device cables because they connect devices. But your VGA cable is your main one that you use to hook up a monitor. That will go in, let me find my little blue arrow here, right there. Hopefully everybody can see that. Most people have hooked up a monitor before, and that is where you would hook it up. This is your more modern DVI for more modern monitors. But you will still see a lot of this VGA connection. Now calling it a device cable is just a generic way of saying that it hooks up to device. Other people will call it a VGA cable or a monitor cable, but there you go because you have your USB cables. They are technically a device cable. You will have your other cables to go to your, for instance, your optical one here. It is still a device cable, but it is a fiber cable technically. So those are the things if you are talking to somebody in the IT world and you are troubleshooting something, you can tell them, well my VGA cable doesn't seem to work. Or when you hook up the monitor they might ask you, is your VGA cable hooked up? And you can say, yes it is, and you will know what they are talking about. You can identify which areas they are on your computer and on your monitor. Another one people are asking about is the system board, and wondering if that is also called a mother board. That is absolutely correct. And if you look at it, over here that is what we were looking at just a minute ago. That is your I-O. We are looking at a top view obviously. So this would be the back of the computer. And then right here is where your CPU goes. Now a lot of people consider a CPU when they talk to it, they say, oh my CPU is out, and they are actually referring to their desktop or their PC. That is actually incorrect because a CPU is your central processing unit, and that is what most people consider the brain of the operations for your computer. And that is if you ever heard of Intel or AMD, that is what they do. They make CPUs that go into this little spot here. And it is kind of hard to tell in this picture, but there are literally hundreds of little pins that your CPU has, and they fit specifically into this layout of pin configuration for specific CPUs. And they lock in, and then you put on a thing called a heat sink that goes on top of that with a fan usually. And it is all to keep the CPU cool because as it works, as it does your work, it heats up. And when it heats up, it slows down. So if you keep it cool, that is how you keep your machine operating optimally so that it stays happy, kind of like a car, back to the car analogy. If your radiator goes, your car goes. Same thing with this, you have to keep it cool. The heat sink looks just like a radiator. I mean if you looked at one without knowing what it really was, you would think of it as being something that cools something just by how it looks. Okay, great. One of the things Joe mentioned to me about the full day workshops that he does on this topic where you actually take a computer apart with a group is how much people enjoy that session and are surprised at how it makes sense. So a resource that we are going to share with you because of course we can actually open a PC and get in depth with all of these things right now, but we are going to be sending some videos. They are from GCS LearnFree which is just a great resource for learning. It is great not only for your own learning, but when you have other people you are helping as they use the PC. There are really good tutorials on a lot of topics. A couple that we are going to share with you are actually doing that. It is a video that shows you the inside of the PC and the same parts and some of these things that Joe has already talked about. So that will give you a chance to look at that information too. Okay, before we move from this slide I just want to point out one item that most people, this one right here, item 5, Random Access Memory. Most people know it as RAM or memory. That is something that will improve your machine best. If you have a machine that is running slow or just having a hard time when you open up more than one program it seems to really impact its usability if you will. This right here, RAM, is something that will improve your machine. Let's see. Other things I want to point out, this is number 4. Number 10, your drives. The hard drive is basically your file cabinet. That is where all the information that you do, that is where it goes. It goes on to your hard drive. So if you are talking with anybody in IT they ask something about where are you putting something, a file, if you are looking for something and they ask about it on your hard drive, that is what they are talking about. If they say C drive, that is where your normal operating system is and where most people only have the C drive. It is synonymous with that basically. And your optical drive is your CD player, your DVD player, burner. The reason I want to point these out is because these are two components that unlike the rest of these, 1 through 10, they can actually be external as well. And I am going to touch on that later on. Joe, maybe I will ask a couple of the questions that we have received that fit right here. One question is about the difference between USB 2.0 and USB 3.0. Basically that is speed. Any time with all this computer upgrades and as computers improve, everything is surrounding speed. How fast can it go so that you can do your thing better? How much better can it operate so that you can see your video games better and not have any junky moves and the graphics are great and all that. It is all about speed. The same applies here with your USB. Your standard USB 2 runs at about 400 Mb. Not that that really means anything, but your 3 is just a step up from that. I want to say it is like 600. Somewhere around there I forget the exact number actually, but that is what it is. And any time you see anything like that where it says USB 2, USB 3, your hard drives for instance, they now go by an identifier of SATA which just means that it is a serial type-based interface and that is for transmitting data. Earlier a few years ago it was SATA 1, then it was SATA 2, now it is SATA 3 and it is on and it keeps going up. And every time you see a number indicator that goes up, that is what they are talking about. They are talking about the next generation. This next generation is faster. Okay, great. And then another question is about the fan and the CPU. I think the question is if the fan does not work right, can that totally damage the CPU? Yes, most operating systems though, and most components within the BIOS actually, that is something we don't need to talk about. But in any case, it protects the CPU, your processor from overheating on its own. And that when it gets to a certain temperature, it just simply says, I quit and your system will shut down. And that is to protect the CPU which is the most vital critical component on your board. And so if the fan stops working, it can no longer cool that CPU. And so what you will likely experience first is your machine starts running sluggish, your other fans may try to compensate and start revving up, and things like that. And so if you know that the CPU fan has quit, and we are talking about the fan that actually sits physically on top of the heat sink. Remember what I was saying earlier, you had from your system board, you put on your processor in that little square area, and on top of that goes what's called the heat sink that looks like a radiator. And on top of that heat sink is a fan, and that is the CPU fan. And that part, when it goes, if it is no longer working, and you know that for a fact, I would highly suggest you shut your machine off and don't run it anymore until you get that fixed. Okay, I think there is a great comment in the text chat from Trisha Perry who said that she learned by, there is a company they contract with for the tech stuff that she can't take care of, and the guy that they send teaches her by letting her take it apart and put it back together. So I think that's pretty great that she has that initiative too. I had the same experience of the way I learned about this was working at a rural library in Minnesota and having a couple of computers that kept having issues, and so TechSupport would have me on the phone and would be talking me through it. So I kind of unwillingly had the same introduction to hardware. And what I really – go ahead, Joe. Oh, I'm sorry. I was just going to say in your scenario, by knowing these components, that really helps because as the person on the other end of the phone is talking with you and describing what you need to do, you have a better idea of what they're talking about and asking them questions. Is this the thing with the little fins that look like a radiator? You already know. So when you get to know your components, you're able to converse more fluidly with the person on the other end of the phone or whatever so that you can come to a remedy. Good. So however you learn that, we'll send the videos and so that will be a way to work on that. And then if you have those opportunities like Trisha to have someone looking over your shoulder or if you're more comfortable even just look over their shoulder. I think that's a great way to get more comfortable with what those different components are and how it all fits together. Absolutely. Okay. Why don't we go ahead and go on to our next tip. Tip 2, Task Manager is your friend. Yes, Task Manager. It's a native software program I should say that comes with Windows. The one you're looking at here in this example is actually from Windows XP. And to get to it is what that control plus alt plus delete is telling you. If you hold down starting with the control key then hit your alt key then your delete key you'll get a window that pops up. Most of you have probably done this before because that is how some people log out. They'll do that because it can get to your log out screen. It can also get to your lock screen. But within that there should be, depending on where you're at some machines won't let you get into the Task Manager and you'll know it by doing this. You do the control alt delete. One of the buttons is grayed out, the Task Manager button. That means your IT department has locked it down so that you cannot get into the Task Manager. But another way of getting into the Task Manager is to down in the Taskbar, down in the bottom when you open up programs, you know how the programs populate the bottom and you'll have your windows and your PowerPoint or whatever and they'll all start populating the bottom. That is the Taskbar area. If you go into an open area of the Taskbar, right-click on that, you'll also have the Task Manager option on that. You'll get a little menu that pops up and you'll be able to select Task Manager and get to it from there as well. This is when we wanted to see if this was something that people were already familiar with if you'd used Task Manager or if it was new. Okay. Oh, yeses are way out in front. All right, vast majority, awesome. Yeah, my husband who is not at all technical, this is one that he, this is his number one troubleshooting tip. It's a good one. It goes to the Task Manager, yeah. It's a good one. It is, yeah. Okay, well we'll go ahead and close the poll. So we're just going to briefly touch on this. What we have here as far as the example given, you'll notice that there's, I lost my little button. In the Applications tab is what we're showing here. And this area here, these are all components that are opened by the user. In other words, if you open up Word, you open up PowerPoint, you open up whatever, it's all going to show here. Okay, and then over here with the status, this is what you want to look for. And what we're after here is if you run into a problem, let's say, okay, right here, as you can see, this is Brenda's screenshot of Brenda's Task Manager. She has a Word document open. It's a brand new one and you can tell because this is document one. If it was one she had already opened before and actually saved and has reopened it, it would have a name right here. It would have your file name on it. But being that it's a new one, let's say she's working on it and then it quits on her. She can't type. She can't close it. She goes up and tries to close the little red X on it and it doesn't work. One thing you can do is get into Task Manager and find out what the system thinks is happening. And over here if it still says it's running, it just means that it's having a difficult time at the current. And so just wait. If it says not responding, that means it's having issues. Still again, it might be worth it to wait. And I say that because it's trying to actually fix itself. And if you're doing something you've worked on for the last two hours, you don't want to lose any of your work. So sometimes it's good to just let it wait, be patient, but then sometimes it just simply hung and it's not going to do any better than where it is. And so therefore you go down to the end task here, make sure it's highlighted like this one is up here, but you would highlight this one down here, the Document 1, and do end tasks. And what it's going to do, it's basically the same thing as clicking on this little red X, but it's slightly forceful I guess you could say. But what it's going to do, it's still going to try and save your information, at least as much as it did from the last auto save that it did. It's going to try and keep that. If it cannot, you're going to get to a point where it's going to say, do you want to force shut down? And then you say yes, and then it's pretty much guaranteed that you've lost your work at that point. If you're able to highlight this and do end tasks, and it does actually close down, chances are you will have saved some of your information. So you won't have lost everything you did, but at least you'll be able to recover and go on from there. The Process tab, the one that's the next in line, this one right here, it has everything that's open right now, all the stuff that's running in the background, and all the stuff that you have opened as well. If you close anything out of there, it's a kill switch. Literally, if you were to take this document, we'll show up in this Process tab right here. If you were to kill it from the Process tab, it literally kills it. There is no saving. It's just boom, it's gone. The other thing in this Process tab is what you have to be careful of. There are other programs in there that are running that if you accidentally kill those, you can mess up where you're at right now. Chances are, if you do a restart, it will come back, but it could make things difficult for you at the time. But this Performance tab is another one. This one here gives a graphic illustration if you will of what's going on. It'll tell you what's going on with your CPU, your RAM, and that's a good one for if you're doing things and your machine starts running real slow, you can go to the Performance tab and it gives you literally a bar graph that tells you if your CPU, your processor is being tapped out. And if it is, then that could be happening like if you have an older machine and you're trying to run the newest suite of Adobe Photoshop or Creative Suite or something like that. And it's just racking on it. It's just being really hard on your CPU. That and your memory, the Adobe Creative Suites are very, very much resource hogs. So you'll probably see a big hit on your memory as well. And so that's a place to go so you can find out what's happening with your machine. It's just normal stuff if you have a bunch of programs open and it's not so much your CPU that's being tapped. You'll probably see that your memory is being tapped. In other words, it's going to have a measurement of how much memory you have on your machine and it's going to tell you how much you have left to use. And it's going to give you an idea of whether or not you need to get more memory. If you're going to continue on with the kind of operation you're doing at that time, if you're working under your normal capacity and it's not plain friendly with you because of the memory issue, I would suggest you look into getting more memory and that should help you. Okay, one question we got about Task Manager is what if it doesn't work? What if you get to the point where you talked about ways we can use Task Manager to troubleshoot but what if you can't get Task Manager to work? What do you do at that point? Do you mean as in it's locked down so you can't get to it? Won't work kind of thing? I think more it's not doing the job that you can't even get that to respond Well, you know that is very true. That is very true. Your end task on your applications tab there, a lot of times you will find that you'll click on it and you'll think it's not doing anything. It actually is and sometimes you just have to have patience and wait. But really you're at the point where you only have the other option is to log out and to force it to shut down that way or to do an actual restart of your machine. And so unfortunately you're at the point where you know patience is a virtue. Go get a cup of coffee. Watch the latest episode of something you missed. But yeah, that is very true. That's obviously from someone who's tried it before and ended up hitting that brick wall. I have to admit Task Manager, the end tasks function does sometime hang as well, but that is your best bet to try and hopefully save what you've been working on. But obviously if it's like Internet Explorer or something like that, you ain't saving nothing there anyway. And that you shouldn't have much trouble with as far as end tasking. One of the resources that we're going to send out is it's actually from the, this is part of Windows, Microsoft Windows, and so the Microsoft website has a pretty in-depth overview of Task Manager and what all of these different parts are, because I realized as you were going through this that I have certain things I use it for, but there's more that I could be doing. Good, thanks for that overview. Okay, should we go ahead and go on to number three? Sure. Okay. All right, and that pretty much says it all, no sounds, no lights, no nothing. So you've come in first day on Monday, first day of the week, and you turn your machine on and you think it's kicked on and you're waiting, and then you realize there's nothing on the screen and there's no lights on your computer. It's not making the usual whizbang sounds of the fans kicking up and everything. This is, you can go ahead and go to the next slide. You're probably where you begin to think something's really terrible wrong. Your first inclination is, oh my gosh, call IT right away or call somebody who cares. What happens most of the time is during the night someone has come in and done some cleaning around your cubicle and turned your search suppressor off. And so everything that's plugged into it won't come on. It's amazing how simple a thing that your machine will be, or your issue will be when you just start following cables and just start thinking, well, let's start from square one. So first thing to do, as it says, check the power, the search suppressor. Find your power where it hooks into the back of your computer, run it back, make sure that it's in a search suppressor. That's a hard word for me this morning. Your search suppressor is something you should have to, I want to point out. If you do not have one, get one. It's the best thing for preventing your machine from getting fried when you have a power surge, whether it be from lightning or someone hitting the telephone pole down the road. It helps protect your gear. In any case, so everything should be plugged into your search suppressor, your monitor, your computer mostly. And so follow it back. See if there's other things that are plugged into that, do they come on? Well, if they don't, well, that's a pretty good indicator that either your search suppressor is kicked. In other words, most of them have a fault in there. And if they got a power surge over the night, or through the night, they'll kick and then they'll turn itself off. And so there might be a reset button. And so you look for the reset button and hit that reset button. First you turn it off, there should be a switch on it, turn it off, find the reset button, hit the reset button, and turn it back on. And if the lamp that was plugged into it now comes on, well, you know you shouldn't be able to turn your PC back on. Follow it back. Swap out the cable. If that doesn't work, it's very, very unlikely that it's going to be your power cable. I have, out of all these instances like this where someone has called up and says, it won't come on, I've gone back, it has always been either the power, or like the next bullet, it's been the bad processor, or excuse me, power supply unit. That is almost always the case. It's one of those two things. I can't remember when it has actually been a cable, a power cable, but I know that as far as online, you find that it has been. But the reason why that is there is just to help emphasize how important it is to swap things out. I'm going to harp on you guys with swapping things out because that is the best troubleshooting tool you have when it comes to physical things. But as far as that, so you've gone into it, you've gone, there's no power, your search pressure is on, your lamp that's plugged into it is working. You've still got no power on your computer. Then, like it says, it's most likely either your bad power supply unit or the system board. So at that point, you call your IT. It could also be the power switch on your machine. I have seen that happen before too. But 90% of the time it's the power supply unit when you're in this scenario. And something like that, there is a test for it, but I'm not going to tell you because I don't want anybody to get curly hair when they don't need it. But in any case, the other thing I want to point out, this is okay. So you've got all this going, you've got your computer up and running, but you have nothing on your screen, on your monitor. Your monitor is dead. Same scenario here. Start looking at the cables, following the cables back. Make sure that your cables are plugged in all the way. Your power one first. If your monitor is not showing anything, but your monitor has a light on it showing that it's got power, make sure that – remember I talked earlier about the VGA cable? That is your device cable for your monitor. Make sure that is plugged in all the way. Follow it into the monitor itself. Follow it all the way back into the computer where it's connected. Make sure that it's securely seated where it's supposed to be. If all those things check out and you're still not getting a display on your monitor, it's either one of two things. It's either the monitor itself or it's the cable. Start with the easy one. Find yourself a known good working monitor cable if you can't swap that out. Still nothing if you can swap out your monitor. Swap that out. But you don't always have the luxury of having a working monitor laying around for you to test out or a VGA cable or your monitor cable. So in those cases, you're kind of stuck. Then you kind of have to either call somebody to come in and look at it, or you call a friend and say, can I borrow your monitor? So things like that. What it boils down to is trace your cables. Make sure everything is connected properly. Connectivity is everything on these things. Even inside your machine, there's cables running that connect things. They're plugged into slots inside the computer onto the system board, to the motherboard. So all those things, things come loose. And sometimes that's all it is. It's just something's loose. So you follow it around, plug it back in, make sure everything is connected. If you verify all that, power connections, so forth, etc., and you're still not getting anything, unfortunately it's time to call your IT. Good. But we have a couple of questions in the chat. One of them, I think Eli made a good point that he had this problem and it turned out it was actually the outlet that was having issues. So I think like you said, Joe, your troubleshooting is all about isolating. What is it? Which piece is it that's having the issues? That's what your troubleshooting is about. What's your opinion on whether or not computers should be turned off every night? Way back in the early days, we'll say, it used to be a big deal because if you turned a machine on and off, it would suffer what's called Chip Creek in which your components would heat up and expand and then as they cooled off they would shrink and then you end up with connection problems that are basically unfixable. So every day you'd have to replace things totally because of that. And so nowadays, it's not as bad. The other thing that used to suffer like in the Windows XP, early XP days, you would have problems with the operating system not really becoming corrupt but it would have things not aligned. We'll go with that for lack of a better description. And so you would have issues doing things and they would say, oh, restart your machine. And that's why. And it would just simply restart. Everything would get back in alignment if you will and everything would be fine. Turning off your machine at night, the only real thing you're helping is the power bill. Nowadays, your components are just fine with turning on and off. It's not a big deal. Leaving it on is not a big deal. The only thing you're really going to hurt is probably if your hard drive continues to spin all night if it's doing something because you're wearing, there's actual physical wear there on the gearing. And then your monitor, in that you can just physically turn off so that your display lasts a little longer. But really, I leave mine on all the time to be quite honest with you. I think this dealing with a dead PC has introduced us to the troubleshooting process. And then I think you had a couple more examples of the same kind of being methodical about troubleshooting. A couple more examples. And here we are, the next examples. All right, mouse or keyboard quit working. Now most of the time you're in the middle of something when this happens to you. And it's always like the earlier example, you've been working on a particular document for the last two hours. It's always at the most in an opportune time when your mouse or keyboard quit working. There again, and we're going to cover this actually when we go a little farther, but there again it's a time to start tracing back points of contact, what's wrong, and it's going to vary a little bit with the mouse and keyboard in this situation because you have two flavors basically. Well technically you have three flavors. You have your wired flavor but you have two flavors. Your wired connections, you have two flavors. You have your PS2 which is your little round one with, I want to say four pins in it, and then you have your USB connection. Your USB connection is your friendly one if you will because usually on your mouse or keyboard if they quit working you unplug them, you plug them back in and that's going to tell you whether or not it was just communication error with your machine because that's what happens normally is that your machine is quit talking with it if you will because there's constant communication going on between your components and your hardware, excuse me, your mouse and your keyboard are no different. When they're plugged into your machine and you're working on stuff, they're constantly sending information back to your machine and your mouse being, you know, it has your right click, left click, and then your keyboard with your lettering. Oh yes, I got yakking too much and wasn't paying attention to what slide we're on. Did you want to go back to the one before that? Sorry about that. I told you to stop me. I get rambling. No, we're getting lots of good questions too. So this is good. All right, a patron is working hard to create something and then it quits. What's your options? What would you think you would do first? And this isn't an actual poll. This is just to get an idea. Most would say put a sign on the computer and call IT. That's generally what happens here. And that's very logical. But if you were doing it, think of it as if you were doing it. What would you do? The first thing you want to do is actually save your work so we can move on now. I like that guy. There was just something really cool about him. I liked him. Yes, you want to save your work. And the reason I say that is because it may come down to restarting your machine or doing something like that in which you have the potential to lose your work. So chances are you'll be fine, but this is a good idea. This falls under the pretense of back up your work, which is what we're going to step into later on as well. So you're using your mouse and you're keyboard quit working and all you have is mouse function. Your normal procedure is to go up and you can save as if it's a new document or just click save. If you just click save, it's an existing document. It'll go back to where it was and it'll save in its current state. If it's a new document and you do save, it'll be a save as. And you won't be able to type anything, so what you want to do is note where the location that it's being directed to. You can redirect the location using your mouse by navigating through the screen, but it's just as easy to note where it's going just so you can get on with things. So note the location and note the name of the document too. Most likely if it's a new document, it's going to be document 1 or something to that description. And then hit the save button. From that point, if it's your keyboard, keyboards don't always unplug if it's they're the PS2 type. They don't always unplug and plug back in very readily. So at this point, not only would you do that, you would make sure everything is closed down and saved and log off. And if you have to do a restart and using your mouse to do that and to bring your keyboard back. But that's obviously after you've checked the connection to make sure that is indeed seated properly. And if you have to unplug it, plug it back in. Sometimes your PS2 type connection will work with the keyboard. So we can probably go on to the next, and the next is using the keyboard. So the reverse is your mouse quit working and you need to save your work. So if you hold the Alt key, which is the one directly left and right of your space bar, you hold that down and hit F4, it's going to try and close that program that is open. Whatever program is open, it's going to try and close that. If it's a program that has changes made to it, it's going to want to save it. If it is one that has already been saved prior, it will save it back to where it was before. If it is a new document, again, note the location. You can navigate, it's a little bit cumbersome, but you can navigate to a new location. But here you should automatically be highlighted in the proper space for you to name the document. So you could just name the document, hit Enter, because that should, I say should, you may have to tab over to your Save button, but hit Enter, and that should save it to wherever it was that it was where you noted to that location. So if I'm going to go to the next slide, this is the example of the two types of connections we have. The PS2, as you see, the green is normally the mouse, the purple is normally the keyboard. Nowadays you can even have some back to that IO interface. If you notice that one, I should have pointed it out, that it was half green and half blue. Most IO interfaces will have either green or, I said blue, green or purple connection on there. So it makes it easy color coded. The older ones, they have a little diagram so you know which one is the mouse and which one is the keyboard. But the PS2 is a little funky. It doesn't always play good and play friendly with you as far as unplugging and plugging back in and expecting it to work. Sometimes once you lose the connection, lose, or how you say, the communication between the system and the piece of hardware, the unplugging and plugging back in doesn't always work with the PS2. The USB on the other hand, that almost always works. If that's what the issue is, is that it's simply an issue where it lost its communication by unplugging the USB and plugging it back in will almost always renegotiate that communication and your two components, your computer and your piece of hardware, be it the keyboard or the mouse, will again talk to each other and start playing together. So we've been through most of this already. Check your connections. USB, like I said, unplug and reseat. The wireless ones, that is the third one that I did not mention earlier. And that is, a lot of times you'll lose a connection. And all you have to do is reset the connection, if you will. Most of the time, they'll have a component which plugs into the computer, and then either your keyboard or your mouse or both will use that same component. And it's a little transceiver type thing, a little antenna, if you will. And on that, oftentimes, it'll be a USB that you plug in on a cable, and then you'll have this little piece that will come up and it will sit like on your desktop. Oftentimes there's a button on that. You press that button and you get it to start searching as what you're doing. And it starts looking for the frequency that your mouse or your keyboard are on. And so once you press that button, it starts looking for them, so that you give it something to find on your mouse or the keyboard, whichever one isn't working. There should be a button on the mouse that's used on the bottom and the keyboard, same way, it's used on the bottom. And it's going to be small. And sometimes it's in a recessed area, so you'll have to use like a pencil or something to get in there, or the tip of a paperclip to push that button. And what you're doing is you're sending out, re-sending the signal, broadcasting to the transceiver so that it says, oh, I found you, and then they reconnect and everything works fine. The other part of that is sometimes it's the batteries. Your battery just simply died. So you change your batteries out and then you repeat the steps of the syncing and where you press the button, the little button on your transceiver to make it look. And then you press the buttons on your components so that they say, hello, I'm here. And then the talking, the communication goes on and where they go. The restart your PC, this is the drastic measure part. All right, if you're doing the keyboard, if your keyboard is the part that is working, you hit Ctrl Alt Delete and you'll have a back to that same window where you can access your device manager, your lock screen, and all that. There should be a restart button that you could tab over to or shut down. And do that, this is your last option. Do that and the system will shut down and restart. If your mouse is the thing that's working, do your normal, go down to your start button and from there navigate over to your restart. If you need one of those work because everything is messed up and you don't have neither mouse or keyboard, you want to do the power button thing. And this is definitely your last resort because this is more or less, I'm going to back that up a little bit. The quick push, there's a difference between the quick push and the hold. The quick push, if you push the power button real quick, it should simulate a safe shutdown. And the safe shutdown is the normal as if you go to your keyboard and navigate to shut down or restart, same thing with the mouse, shut down or restart. What that does, it's going to save, there's any open components right now, any documents that are open, it's going to save those. It's going to try to anyway. And most of the time it will just save to its last recent save point. At that point you'll go down to, it will shut down, it will go through its motion and you'll see that it's shutting down. And then once it's all the way shut down, give it a second, push the button and restart it. The drastic measure is the hold. Sometimes when you do the quick push, that puts it into a sleep mode. Kind of irritating, kind of pointless in my opinion, but some machines are set to go into sleep mode when you do a quick push on the button. If it does go into sleep mode, you'll probably have to wake it up, which simply means push the button again real fast and it'll wake it up. You'll still be in the locked position where you were, nothing won't work. But you'll have to hold it this time so you push the button in and literally hold it for a few seconds and your machine will shut down. You'll hear it all go, it'll all shut down. From that point you restart it. In theory, if everything's as it should be, you're good to go. Your keyboard will work, your mouse will work. Hopefully you will have saved your work. You won't be out of anything. So here we are again, same thing, swap out hardware. If that didn't work, you start looking for hardware that you know works, swap it out. You may have to repeat some of the steps like if it's a PS2. You plug it back in. If that doesn't work, you might have to log out, log back in. Hopefully you don't have to restart. The other thing is the driver issue, that may be the issue. It's pretty rare, but it has happened. And that's usually with special, we'll call them special like your wireless keyboard and mouse, or some of your ergonomic ones that have a lot of extra keys that do tasks that you assign. Those will oftentimes have drivers that you need on your machine. And sometimes they will go bonkers and you have to reinstall the driver or update the driver. And if none of that works, we're to the call IT part. Oh man, it's already almost, I'm yacking too much. No, you're doing alright. We've just got one tip left. Okay, connectivity, bent through that, lights, power, action. That pretty self-explanatory now. No lights, it's probably power. If you get the power going, you should have action if you don't call your IT. Be methodical. That's what I was really trying to stress through all of this. Swap out the suspects. There you go. When you're at your last wit, try and swap it out to make sure that your component is indeed bad. When you run out of those steps, time to call your IT. Sorry, I talk so much. That's okay. No, this is great. It looks like it's helping people a lot. The last tip has to do with the bane of many people's existence, and that is printers. And so we can't have a troubleshooting webinar without talking about printers and ways to troubleshoot the issues that happen with those. Okay, I'm going to give you a quick rundown first on how they work. Basically when you press print, it sends a message to your printer, which also has RAM, which is what we talked about earlier, and the memory. It sends the print job into the memory of the printer. And the printer then, in turn, is almost like a computer itself because it has a processor, and it says, okay, I'm ready to print that one next in line, and it takes the information off of that and starts printing. When that goes bad, it can be either, well, I'm going to stay on what we have here. Check paper tray. If you don't get a print job, oftentimes you'd be surprised how many people just think the paper tray is always full, but check that. The print queue, sometimes someone else printed it. If it's on a network printer, sometimes someone else has printed something that is corrupt, and it hangs up the print queue, and everybody behind them gets hung up, or your machine is just hung up. And so you clear the print queue, and to get to that, if you're on an XP machine, you go on your start button up to your printers and faxes, I believe it's called. Open that up, find your printer, right click on it, go to properties, and it'll give you a little thing pop up when it shows you what's in the print queue. Cancel all those, try again. That doesn't work. Sometimes there's something wrong with the printer itself and the memory. The buffers get hung up. If you cycle the printer off and on, basically it turned off. Wait a second. A few seconds, turn it back on. It clears those buffers. Try printing again after that. Sometimes your settings go bonkers. That's a little deep that goes into your printers, and your printer properties, and printer preferences. You go into there and start looking in there. Unless you're kind of used to that, you may not recognize exactly what might be off there. But the main thing is, probably one to check on is the drivers on it. Sometimes you have to just simply switch drivers and switch them back. That'll do it sometimes. But the verified settings can be a little iffy, sometimes to be quite honest, but that is something to look at. The check connections, like I've been drilling through the whole part, connections, connections, but honestly that has been rarely the case with printer issues, and that's why it's a little lower on the list actually. These printers, being from the IT, doing desktop support, they're the ones that we spend the most time on. There you go. Try printing to a different printer if you have that capability just to make sure that there's nothing wrong with your print spooler. And when it comes down to it, if all those don't work, call your IT. Okay. Well, last slide just has some tips that you wanted to throw in, and I think they addressed some of the questions that people have asked too, so I'm going to go through those quick, Joe. Sure. PC ventilation. Like I said earlier, things heat up. They need to breathe. They need to stay cool to run optimum. Backup critical data, that was something I mentioned earlier. If you can do nothing else with your machine, at least back up your data. Back up the stuff that you need. And if you have to, like this says in the next bullet, use external hard drives if needed. Get an external hard drive from wherever, Best Buy, Costco, wherever. Every now and then plug that in. All the work that you've done that you need, you want to save, put that on there. If it's stuff that you periodically change and update, make sure that the most updated version of it is on your external hard drive. Listen to your PC. And what I mean by that is you'll get to know it. If it's suddenly revving way up, like I mentioned earlier, your fan's revving way up, you've got a problem with your heat dispersion. It could be just simply, it needs a good cleaning. That is most likely the problem actually. If your computer's sitting down on the ground, on the floor, it collects more dust than it would if it was up on the desk. It collects dust, it gathers up in the fins of the heat sinks, therefore it cannot cool off more as efficient as it should, so you need to get that cleared out. And clicking noises. If your hard drive suddenly is hearing it making like supersonic Morse code, if it's starting to do that, your hard drive may be on its way out. Sometimes hard drives just make noises. So it's kind of hard to tell there, but that comes back to where back up your critical data so that if it is starting on its way out, you'll at least have your critical data. We have a couple of questions about the dust, so I'll just throw them in here. Is there any way to keep it from collecting, keep the dust down? Location is the best thing. Really no, there isn't. The only thing you can do is try to locate it in an area where you'll minimize it coming in. And someone said they had a computer was making a horrible noise. They opened it up and could tell it was a fan, but they cleaned it, but they still had the noise. Is there anything more they can do? Yeah, if at all possible replace the fan, what is most likely to happen is that the fan itself is going bad. Most of them don't have bearings anymore, although some of them do, but they're old and the parts wear, and they'll start to warble. So they won't spin flat if you will, and so they start making noises. Great, thank you. Do you want to continue on or do we need to exit stage left? Well, I don't know if you've noticed in the chat, but we've been getting many requests for you to do another webinar for us, so I may be… Awesome, thank you guys. Yeah, thank you. This has been great. You have done a great job of explaining a lot of things. Again, remember we're going to send out resources too. Joe has shared some of his favorites, and I have found a bunch too. So we'll share those, and they're on different things like using Task Manager, getting to know the components, basic troubleshooting techniques, that kind of thing. So hopefully this kind of inspired you to want to go the next step with all of this. Do I have something to say, one thing real quick? They asked about the run, slash cmd, slash ipconfig, I happen to notice that one. That is a way if you get into your run prompt, and that's if you go start run, that will bring up your run prompt. You type in cmd into that and hit enter, and then type in, you'll get what's called the command line interface. You type in ipconfig and hit enter. That will give you your IP address. And so if someone is troubleshooting and they need to know what your IP address, what gateway you're going through, and so forth, it will tell you those little things if you're talking with somebody in an IT. Okay, great. And screenshots, you have that on there too. And one of the follow up resources that I found was on just simple steps on how to take a screenshot when you're getting an error message, because that can be so handy when you're talking to IT. Yep, that's exactly why it's there. It's because we need that information to help troubleshoot. Great. Well, thank you so much, Joe. This has been great. And thank you everyone for the active chat too. We'll be following up. We'll take a look at questions that didn't get answered, and we'll work to make sure they get answered in the follow up message too. And we have another one of the EDGE Initiative benchmark webinars coming up next month. And that one is on Assistive Technology, specifically focused on children with autism and other developmental differences. And we'll hear about Come On In, which is a program at the Skokie Public Library in Illinois. You'll see an evaluation form as the webinar ends. And we'd love it if you'd take some time to share with us what you thought of this webinar, and also your suggestions for future webinars too. We'd closely look at those, and that's helpful information for us. Well, that was a fast hour. Thank you so much, Joe. And thank you everyone for being here. We'll call it a wrap.