I work in a high-stress field. When the Information Technology department is called, it’s usually because something is wrong. Often, whatever is wrong needed to be working yesterday.

It’s how IT people end up becoming Nick Burns, the character in a Saturday Night Live skit, “The Company Computer Guy”.

But, as a whole, IT folk understand your frustrations.

Even though we are here to help, we can’t always determine the problem immediately. Sometimes determining what is wrong requires some delving and trial and error.

This is when you, the user, become our biggest asset.

Generalizations are a technician’s biggest enemy when fixing a computer. There is a big difference between “it broke” and “it made a loud pop and turned off. I smelled smoke and now it won’t turn back on.” Obviously, the second description directs the technician toward a specific problem.

When learning anything new (especially software) or just working at a computer regularly, keep a note pad nearby. Write down questions that arise and errors that you experience, the more detailed the better. Logging questions as you have them will prevent you from forgetting minor things the next time the technician visits. Tracking everything from how often you reboot to the application that was running when your computer crashed will help direct the technician toward the solution.

Error messages are another important device for technicians diagnosing your machine’s problem. I understand the desire to quickly click through them without jotting down specifically what they say. This becomes a challenge to the tech, because each program on the computer might create an error for any of a hundred different issues. If the tech doesn’t know exactly what the error message said, it’s hard to find the malfunction.

A screen shot is a quick and easy way of solving this problem. A screen shot, or screen capture, is a photo of the entire screen of your computer. On a Mac: push Command (the key with the Apple icon) + Shift + 3, and a file name, “Picture 1,” will appear on your desktop. On Windows pushing the PrintScreen key on the keyboard will copy a screen capture to the clipboard. You can then just paste the file into a Word document and save the file (http://tinyurl.com/lltf). If you have Vista (all versions except Home Basic Edition), the included Snipping Tool will let you capture a section of the screen.

In just seconds, you can have a record of the error or issue you see on your computer screen. If you are seeing intermittent lines on your screen, a screen capture is very helpful to a tech. If the image shows lines over the whole picture, the problem will be different that if the image shows lines over a single application. If lines don’t show up in the image, it’s probably a monitor issue. A single screen capture can explain a lot about what might be going wrong.

I understand computer failures are time consuming and tend to happen at the most inconvenient times. Your tech is there to help; the more you can help him or her, the faster you’ll be back up and running.

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