What Should You Do to Improve Your Computer Troubleshooting Skills?

Improving your computer troubleshooting skills so you become more tech savvy is never an overwhelming task given the sheer number of ways anyone can learn to do so, given the right amount of diligence. So if ever you think that learning and improving your computer troubleshooting skills can’t be done online, think again, because that’s basically where you start.

Do your online research

The first and most important step in becoming computer savvy is to learn how to use the search engines to your advantage.  It’s important to learn how to correctly pose a question for search, and how to use Google, Yahoo, or Bing to find your answer. Basically, if there’s something you don’t know about a computer, the first thing is to check out the first few hits of a search to get some information. For example, when someone gets a specific virus or has a specific problem affecting their computer, a quick search will often show how to resolve it. After a few years of using search engines to research different things about computer troubleshooting, you begin to form a solid working knowledge without even trying.

You won’t know unless you practice

Don’t be afraid to try something on a used computer. After all, there is hardly ever an action you can perform on a computer that will permanently break it. That being said, make sure you have back-ups of anything important if you plan to try it on your own computer. Find a used computer on Craigslist for cheap. This provides a great platform for you to practice troubleshooting. If you don’t have a computer you can experiment, you can check out episodes on creating a virtual computer, “How to Use a Virtual Machine” by searching on Google. A virtual machine allows you to mess up anything you want because you can reset it back to any point in time, or just start over.

Read a lot

There are free courses for Windows, Apple, and Linux users on the internet. If you want to get more acquainted with Windows, you can find a ton of tutorials and other learning material on the Microsoft website. The same goes for Apple, which provides more than enough documentation for you to study. If you want to learn about Linux, there’s a full course on edx.org that is partially narrated by the creator of Linux himself. For anything else, there are endless and awesome series of YouTube videos that covers almost any computer topic you can think of in extreme detail. A little bit of time and practice with this material and you’ll gain a pretty comprehensive understanding of computers. And to think all of this is for free.