Using Google as Your Technical Support

Image by FlySi via Flickr

You are doing your stuff on your computer one day when suddenly, a dialog box pops out of nowhere informing you of a computer error. What would you do? Maybe, you’ll just click OK or Cancel and be done with it; but if the error is persistent, say every time you run a particular program or each time you boot up your computer, then you might just have to do something about it.

If your company has a technical support group, then maybe you can just call them up. But there is also another way. Remember that for most of the errors that you will encounter, somebody else around the whole wide world must have also encountered that same error in the past. In which case, that computer error must have probably been solved already and the solution is floating somewhere around the Net.

That is how Google can help you. It will search for the documented solutions to your computer error.

• The first thing that you will have to do is take a screen shot of the dialog box containing the error message;
• Save it to a file for future reference;
• Copy the exact error message and enter it as a search string in Google;
• Check the search engine results page for entries relevant to your problem;
• Most entries would include images of the actual error. Compare these with the screen shot you saved in a file.

There you go. You can now choose the most relevant solution.