Sometimes it’s better to just stop.
I used to own a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda. When something went wrong with it you could hear hissing or clicking or some other indicator of what was wrong and where it was at. Nosing around under the hood and jiggling things often solved problems if you had an “iron” car. I have always considered myself to be handy at doing mechanical things and I used to maintain my “cuda”, no problem.
Some years ago I purchased a new car and while talking about it to a long time friend I mentioned that I had opened the hood, looked at the engine and couldn’t find the spark plugs. He gave me this long incredulous look and slowly said: your car doesn’t have spark plugs. The end of my working on my own cars day was at hand. In the time I owned that car I rarely opened the hood, the dealer did, the oil place did, but I didn’t, I knew it was out of my league.
If I had ever needed to work on that car, however, I could have but I would not have done it in the same way I did it with the “cuda”. Working on that car would have required me to research the problem and probable solutions. Because most of the things that can go wrong with a modern car are not intuitive, nosing under the hood and jiggling things around is going to get you nowhere when trying to troubleshoot most car problems these days.
The solution to many things that go wrong with a computer or computer network are not intuitive and do not lend themselves to “fiddling”. Sometimes it’s just better to stop, do the neccessary research to get at least a cursory understanding of what needs to be done. Then work on your system or call in outside help if you are out of your league.
The worst thing you can do. Let me repeat this, the worst thing you can do, is to start randomly changing settings without any underlying knowlege of what your doing and not making notes about what you have changed.
This is how I explain it to my clients.
Think of your computer as a basketball court covered with light switches, thousands of them, some on some off in what seems to be a random pattern. Each switch has a purpose some important some not but all contributing to the stability of your computer. Flick a switch, any switch, something is going to stop working or change, you may not see the change but it’s there. The more you flick switches without knowing what they do the less stable your computer becomes (the basketball court begins morph into a paintball range), until, flick, your computer stops functioning (the basketball court/paintball range, disappears). If we made notes of what switches we flicked we can get our basketball court back, if not…
Avoid the temptation to “fiddle with settings” and hope you find the problem, it’s not going to happen. The most likely outcome is that you will make the problem worse. Stop, take the time to research the problem (thats what search engines are for) and go from there. If you find you are out of your league call in help.
Fair Warning.
