[Jacob Mannon]

Troubleshooting is the active application of the scientific method being applied in the technological field. It could also be compared to a doctor treating a patient. An I.T. professional will be presented with an issue. They must then find the source of the problem and then attempt to solve or fix the issue and hopefully prevent it from reoccurring. Recently, I had the opportunity to implement this very task. I had kept an old laptop that had slowed down horribly and wouldn’t load anything. After completing the OS systems course, I was able to do some forced restarts and updates, run the system file checker and repair corrupted files. Now my old laptop runs like it used to and I haven’t had any issues on it. Troubleshooting may not always be very straightforward. There may be times when a user has to utilize what is called the “theory of probable cause”. We may think we know what our issue is, but we need to test it to be sure. This is a process that will repeat until we can be sure that the system is back to running as it should. Then we record our findings for future problems that may occur. This is all valuable in that I am able to help solve others as well as my own technological issues and spare resources that might have otherwise been spent on new hardware/software.