 Hi, my name is Sandra Betakis and I'm here to share with you lots of knowledge on enterprise desktop support technicians. I have been living in the IT trenches for over 20 years now, starting off with early versions of Microsoft DOS. As a matter of fact, my first MCSE and my first support call was actually within the DOS and Windows 3.1 environment. I still remember Windows 3.11 and Windows for Work Groups being a really, really big deal and it seems so complex. So outside of this particular training course or this video course, I actually go out and not only run a business where we support, but also act as a tech as well in advising and fixing enterprise desktops and of course the servers that they work with. So through this experience and some knowledge on what's going to be on this upcoming exam, we're going to put them together and see if there's a good course here for you to study up and learn what Windows 7 is all about to take your knowledge one step further. In this chapter, we'll get a chance to identify cause and how to resolve our desktop application issues. What that means is we'll start off by really talking about what the role of an enterprise technician is. I won't spend too long, but I'd like to make sure that we're clear on the role of the job scope because really it's that job scope that speaks to this entire module. So we'll learn a little bit about troubleshooting, how to troubleshoot programs, use the troubleshooters, go through problem steps to your quarter. Some real basic, here's your desktop, how do I find the root cause to all of these problems? We'll get a chance to look at applications because applications are the root of a lot of problems. Of course, without applications, we don't need a computer, so that's the whole reason. So we'll learn a little bit about how to install them different ways, how to lock them down with group policy. We'll even get into app locker enforcement rules and really some requirements to be able to not only support the desktop, but also control what's going to be on that desktop itself. We'll also get a little deeper into software and talk about items like what is digital signing, what that whole thing is about, how to find out about program compatibility for some of the legacy programs, and even some of the add-ons like dealing with our compatibility toolkit, which we can actually download and use. User account control, which is relatively new, which can cause some havoc, but it can also do a lot of good. How to use Windows installer, and then of course how to make sure that the machine itself and all of its applications are up to date at all times. We'll end the chapter by talking a little bit about Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer, because we are so web-based, is really the root of really the most used application on a desktop. It would actually be the browser. So let's learn a little bit about how it works, some of the options, how to get into the history, viewing website certificates, and all the things that people don't think about when they open up the browser and they start surfing the web. The first thing that I would like to cover is the role of an enterprise technician. Now the job scope, which is really the scope of this course, and really the scope of starting in this chapter, is what an enterprise technician is. There's a lot of different roles in today's IT industry. Now you have your help desk, you have your desktop technician, and really the scope here is the enterprise technician, which in my mind is one step higher than your standard desktop technician. Standard desktop knows how to install software, maybe an operating system, and really just gets some of the bare-bone tasks done. However, on the enterprise level, enterprise really opens it up to understanding what's also going on on the server side. So it's not someone who just knows how to install Office on a desktop by instructions, but someone who understands what the server environment is going to be, what the network infrastructure environment is going to be, and being able to support that desktop on a much higher level. So the role of an enterprise technician is of course to do some general troubleshooting. Now there is no enterprise technician that has every single answer, and for anyone who says they do, we know that they don't. General troubleshooting means you know the tools that help you discover what's going wrong, and also the tools or the knowledge to how to go find the answer. So once we know the problem, it doesn't mean we know how to fix it. We have to know how to go find that answer and what our resources are. Also, the role of an enterprise technician is user education. This is a huge one. I recently sent out one of my guys to a very good customer who has a lot of hack attempts in their network. Now this is very common. We get to monitor and we see that there are some people trying to invade from overseas. So what we need to do is we need to change passwords. We have to change how things are connected. We have to change how users might remote to their desktop. Now we can go in and make all of those changes and say, and by the way, you have to change your password and it has to be complex, and we're now going to change it all the time and we could just walk away. That's going to take our users and make them very angry, very uncomfortable. They don't like the changes. User education means we explain to them what's going on and why this is all very important. We don't just change their password policies but we explain why those changes are important and what could happen if we don't change them. That's the user education piece. It's not, this is what I've done but this is why I'm doing it and this is why we have to make some changes so that the users can appreciate and also work with you in terms of some of the changes that need to be made to the desktop, to the network environment, et cetera. Now users who don't understand the need for password policies, the ones that are going to put sticky notes all over their screens. The ones who know that there is a lot up for loss, they're the ones that are going to work with you. Enterprise technicians also work with software. Not only do we install it a multitude of ways, we configure it, we upgrade it and we support it when it doesn't go right. Also monitoring. Just because it looks like it's working doesn't mean it is. It's through monitoring that I'm able to discover that there are hack attempts on this network I just spoke of. Now if it wasn't for the monitoring software and us going in and looking, we would have absolutely never known. There were no tracks. Once we started looking, there were plenty of tracks and again, that's the monitoring piece, not the, oh they got in and now it's broken piece. And of course documentation. For everything you think you're going to remember, always realize that you probably won't. I tend to document absolutely everything. Now everyone has their own way of documenting. Documenting could be anything from a notebook, small company, one IT person. It could be help desk software. It could be anything that you use that works, not just for you, but the people who might actually need to use your notes. Now I have help desk software that I use that tracks my technicians, my customers, anything that's happened, changes are made, why they were made, but I even take it to another level where I have a notebook. Notebook goes everywhere with me. So as I'm working on something, all of those notes that you have to quickly write down, whether it's a case number with a hardware vendor or something you changed. Again, I finally learned after 20 years of IT support that I don't always remember what I just did. Even if I'm trying a series of passwords because I can't remember which one it was. I tend to go ahead and keep a list and I try this, I try this, I try this, then of course you have to destroy it, cross it out, whatever it takes, but that documentation, that magic notebook is all sequential. So six months from now when I say, gee, you know what, I worked on that a couple months ago. I don't see notes in the system. I can go back to my notebook and even see some of my notes that maybe didn't translate into the software. Just a nice way to reference everything. So if you want to know what the role of an enterprise technician is, that's it. That's a little bit of advice on how to make sure everything is solved, documented, and of course on a good role. Windows 7 has given us a lot to help with troubleshooting. And I have to admit, even though I've been with Windows 7 since the beginning of Windows 7, sometimes I even forget where to go. And when I say I forget where to go, it's because I've got so many other habits, from event viewer to what type of log files to where I look first, second, and third, that sometimes I forget that it's built right in, meaning there's a shortcut, a quicker way to get there. So let's first talk about control panel troubleshooting. Control panel troubleshooting allows you to look at your most common computer problems. You know what? It probably isn't the first program that's not running correctly. It's probably not the first piece of hardware that's not running, or maybe the first printer that's not printing. Whatever it is, we have all of those common problems right here in control panel. So what you're going to see is I'm officially in control panel. I tend to click on the all control panel items. Why? Because I just hate when it's sorted into categories. I think further. But under all control panel items, I go into troubleshooting. By the way, for the record, I like to get to things quickly. So even though there's control panel, and then you can find the group and you can slowly browse in, I either hit all items or I go to the search bar and I start typing in troubleshooting, and it brings me right where I need to go. So what we have here in troubleshooting is we have programs. So programs allow us to look at programs that are made for previous versions of Windows. We have hardware and sound. Now hardware and sound, of course, is any device in there so we can learn how to configure a device or troubleshoot how to configure a device. Printers are enormous. In fact, that's one of the biggest areas that people tend to troubleshoot or complain about. Here's your audio recording or maybe our audio playback. So right here, we've kind of taken the most common hardware and sound and put them right there, right up front. But if what you're looking for doesn't seem to be there, then all you have to do is you have to click on the heading of hardware and sound and you're going to get a full list of everything else. Remember, the point here is to show you most common first and then one step further will show you everything. Same thing goes for programs, network internet, appearance and personalization, system and security. So what about network and internet? Let's think about some of the things that we do. We like to connect to the network because we need to get to the server or maybe we have a VPN or a dial-up client. Maybe we're browsing and we're looking for resources. These are the areas that people tend to go to first and, of course, when they can't get there, they call us. So what we're going to do is you're going to see here, I'll just go ahead and keep my screen kind of clean. We can connect to the internet. We can access shared files and folders or, of course, if you're trying to find something else in that common list, then you just go into the heading. Appearance and personalization, an area that everyone goes into. Appearance and personalization isn't just, hey, why can't I find that cool fall wallpaper, really some of those desktop effects may not be working or maybe they're conflicting with an application or maybe you're trying to get some arrow effects and you can't because you don't have the right hardware on your machine. So here we can do some of that troubleshooting. When you're looking at the operating system in security, operating system needs updates. We have to run maintenance tasks. We have to improve how we use power. Maybe it's a laptop and we want to fine-tune it or maybe we're just trying to go green and we can also look for performance issues where it'll actually allow us to go in, see the machine as a whole and allow us to discover maybe we need a faster processor or maybe the hard drive is a little bit slower than it needs to be and that's going to be your bottleneck. So everything that I go through in this course and most of the things that I talk about, if you need to troubleshoot them, they've really built in quite a few right here. Now looking along the left bar, just to show you, if we're troubleshooting, that means we have questions, we're in trouble. So we can look at all items. We can look at the history. We can change settings. I love this one. Get help from a friend. We will eventually talk about that one. We can also look at the Action Center, which gives you some important messages about the operating system, meaning, hey, your antivirus is out of date and we have a firewall or we detected this problem. We can go to Help and Support, look at some more resources and of course if things are really going badly, here's a direct link to recovery items. So again, when I say I sometimes forget about this, I know how to go to Event Viewer or how to go to Recovery Programs or how to troubleshoot things in Device Manager. But this screen was designed, if you don't have those old habits, to really come in and see the whole picture at once and get direct links into some of the more popular ones. So here's your program's troubleshooting. We can connect to programs for add-in packs. Now, what's a program? Well, a program is pretty much anything. It could be Microsoft Word. It could be your internet connection and your web browser. It could be an older program that you're trying to run. The other day, someone actually gave me an Act Version 6 disc that's been around forever and they said, this is the best version. It's simple. It runs quick. It does this. It does that. Please make it work with Windows 7. So, you know, I start playing with program compatibility. I guess for more information on that, we're still playing. Act has been upgraded a gazillion times in the last 10 years. But, you know, this is where you start. How to troubleshoot printing. And of course, we have Windows Media Player, the settings, the library, the DVDs. People don't realize you can play DVDs on your computer through Media Player, but you can also do a lot of burning of discs and DVDs and music and whatever. So, again, it's a pretty popular program and it could be more popular if people realized the potential. So, as you go through program troubleshooting, notice what we've done is all control panel items, troubleshooting and then programs. Remember I said you've got the heading and then the quick links? Well, this is going into the heading and it gives us a pretty wide scope on different programs and connections that we might need to make. So, if you want to use a troubleshooter, then what happens with a troubleshooter is we're allowed to pick a particular problem that we're having. We're allowed to run a troubleshooter, but we also have this advanced tab. And I put a screenshot here for you because you'll see here on advanced, when you click it, it just looks like a little blue word here, but it's actually a hyperlink. And when you click on it, this right here is a pretty key check mark and a lot of people don't see it because it's not obvious. I'm not sure why they put that hidden into a separate dialog box. I think if I was a designer, I probably would have put the question right here and allowed people to check it or not check it. But I guess I wasn't on the design team, so do be aware that that is there. So this right here says apply repairs automatically and we can click on next. Apply repairs automatically means we're going to look at the program, we're going to figure out why it's not running, we're going to make all those changes automatically and then hopefully the whole thing is just fine. So whether or not you choose that is up to you. I tend to like to see what the repairs are, if possible, so that I learn from the experience and I know the next time around. But sometimes you just know that this is how you fix it and it's a quick run through because you've already done it 20 times. So what happens here is if you go into all control panel troubleshooting all categories, remember I said there's a lot more than meets the eye, you're going to see that we have a lot here, in fact we're not even at the end of the list, we have quite a few more to go. So we can go into Arrow, connecting to workplaces, display quality, hardware, home groups, this is a newer thing with Windows 7, people are trying to understand incoming connections, which would be really firewall stuff. We have Internet Explorer, network adapters, and skipping through the list, power printers, they're all in there. So we have an ability here to look at all of these settings, but also what we can do with the troubleshooter is it goes through services and it makes sure they're okay and if for some reason this doesn't work we do have some different options like we can go into help, we can post questions on a blog, we can get help from a friend, which could either be a phone call or using that link that I've shown you where you can get help from a friend and we start with some remote assistance. There's recovery options to back out of something because it worked fine yesterday and of course there's a lot of online support as well.