The life of an IT technician
After working in IT support for over 13 years the company has experienced a lot of IT support issues and to this day we still have a lot of new issues crop up. This is mainly due to how fast technology is growing and changing, it is an industry that has and will continue to chop and change, thus IT technicians have to be on top of their game to understand these new issues and be prepared with a suitable solution.
That being said, we are still subject to the same issues that will always crop up at least once a day in a medium sized company. There are things to do to make these issues avoidable but eventually they will pop up at some time. The issues in question tend to have solutions that are fairly easy to carry out, even if you don’t have IT experience and thus reading this post you may learn how to do it yourself, even if you are a user with little to no experience.
The 4 Common Issues
Kicking off we have an IT technician’s worst nightmare, a slow computer. This is a really pain, mainly because a slow computer can be influenced by so many aspects in hardware, firmware and software. Not to mention, when you get that call from a user, they expect you to work some magic and for the computer to magically become quick again, despite the fact the machine they are using is 7 years old and on its way out. The age of the computer being an exception, a computers speed can be fixed by analyzing the slowness via task manager (see what processes are using the resources) and whether they can be fixed or stopped.
The analysis is the most important aspect, if you can identify what is causing the computer to be slow, the fix is generally easy. For example, if a process you don’t recognize is using all the resources, and after some research you find out it is malware, you need to get rid of it. Whereas if Google Chrome is being slow, you need to investigate further and determine whether you have a faulty plugin, extension or you simply need to clear the cached data. Most of the time though, slow computers will have an easy fix.
‘My internet isn’t working’. We tend to get this one quite a lot and it tends to be because someone has knocked a switch or and Ethernet cable has become faulty. The fix is therefore simply, a restart of the switch is required and the Ethernet cable needs to be replaced. Sometimes the problem can be deeper such as an IP conflict, but that is rare, and other times it could be the internet provider is having service disruptions in the area of question. When the internet goes down, it can be scary as everyone uses it, and clients understandably so get anxious when it is down for more than 5 minutes.
‘Can’t connect to the printer’. Providing the IT technicians have set the printer up correctly this shouldn’t be a problem. When we get this issue, unless it is a wireless printer, we find that the users don’t have their network cable in and thus can’t connect to the printer. The other most common reason is the printer isn’t installed correctly on their computer i.e. they don’t have the correct driver in place or are connecting to the wrong IP address.
‘I don’t know how to do this’. Most of the time when we get a phone call it is because a user doesn’t know how to do something. For example, it could be they don’t know how to add an out of office message in their email or they don’t know how to create a spreadsheet in Google Drive. It is amazing the amount of user problems that come up, and despite most of the systems they use, there is always a couple of queries for users who are slightly inept when comes to carrying out IT processes.
Final words
The above problems are a brief demonstration of daily problems that always seem to crop up, problems that will continue to crop up due to the nature of them. But the enjoyment we get out of these problems is, while they seem simple, they tend to be not. Sometimes a printer cable could have come lose, but there are occasions when the printer needs reconfiguring, and thus every day presents itself with new exciting challenges for us to deal with.
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