It’s somewhat ironic that computer scientists often get asked for computer help that they can’t provide.  The truth is that software-writing ability generally doesn’t depend on utilitarian knowledge of Windows 2000, optical mice, wireless access points or printer drivers.  A number of computer scientists in fact take offense when asked for general computing help.  I guess they see it like asking a biologist for help troubleshooting a microscope or something though I’m not sure the biologist would be quite as offended.  I suspect they may act offended because they honestly don’t know.

I’ve always had a place in my heart for IT and happen to take pleasure in banging my head against strange computer (or more often, user) glitches.  And as unglamorous as diagnosing computer slow-downs or malfunctioning peripherals may be, I’d go as far as saying that my troubleshooting abilities are some of the most valuable skills I have.  What does it take to teach those?  Why don’t more people have them?

I recently received an e-mail from someone I really like and respect.  Our conversation went something like:

• Short e-mail asking if I could help her fix her backspace
• I ask whether it’s a mechanical problem and if so recommend popping out the key and cleaning it
• She answers with more details: the backspace key doesn’t delete a selected region of text but works otherwise
• I ask what program it’s happening in.  By this point, I suspect a Word or Office setting so I ask her to try in notepad, Outlook and Word
• It’s only in Word
• After a little poking around, I find the “typing replaces selection” setting

This is representative of the kinds of problems I’m asked to address — the issue is that most users don’t realize what their problem actually is.  In this case, the backspace key itself was fine but a software setting had changed.  It turns out that searching for “overwrite word selection” in Google provides a solution from Microsoft as the first hit.  Does it take a sophisticated understanding of the way computers work to know what questions to ask or things to try?

I’d like to try to help my students gain troubleshooting abilities but I’m not sure how to go about it.  Some of the things I’d like them to think about:

• Eliminate hardware first (“is it plugged in?”  “Is the cable ok?”  “Is the socket ok?” “what if you plug it in elsewhere?”)
• Applications have their own settings (“does it happen in application X?”)
• Some applications are related (IE-Windows, the Office suite)
• Rebooting solves a lot of problems
• The right search query solves a lot of problems.  Coming up with it requires asking lots of questions until you have ideas on what might be causing the problem (hardware, settings, interaction between programs, malware)

Having “book knowledge” of troubleshooting isn’t particularly helpful, though.  I guess I can reproduce the backspace issue, for example, pretty simply and have them walk through how they would address it.  I wonder what students would do with that…