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.
