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What to do when something doesn’t work

by Tris Hussey on February 23rd, 2007

There is a drawback about being known as a computer guy, you sometimes get grabbed to fix things out of the blue.  Like today.  I’m heading across the parking lot to get my car registration and Lorraine grabs me, “Judy (her boss) can’t print something, we need you to fix it…”  Okay, of course I’ll try.  Saying you’ll try is important.  Part of the Scotty Principle…don’t promise that you can fix it and that it will “just take a sec”.  You’re asking for trouble.

Anyway the problem was that they couldn’t print an important PDF file that they get periodically at the gas station.  Sure, let’s take a look.  The PDF loads fine.  Good.  Click print, good.  Window comes up.  Nice.  Okay … boom.  “An error has occurred and Acrobat needs to close.”

So this is the first step.  When you get an error message, read it.  Try to make sense of it.  Obviously that error message isn’t terribly helpful, but if you have to ask someone for help (friendly neighborhood geek, tech support, etc.), that will be the first thing that they ask.

So we have an unhelpful error, what’s next?  In this case I wanted to see what version(s) of Acrobat was installed.  Turned out, both Acrobat Reader 5 and 7 were installed.  Yeah, that’s gonna cause a problem.  So I uninstalled all of them and downloaded and installed Reader 8.

This is the second step (sorta).  I knew that Reader was out of date, but that shouldn’t effect printing per se.  Check to make sure that you don’t have multiple versions of an application installed.  Adobe is really bad about this.  I’ve seen (and even done myself) several versions of Acrobat installed on the same machine.  Don’t count on a new version always getting rid of the old one, so check.

Now assuming you have only one version of the software, this is the time to check for updates.  I just downloaded the new one in this case.

In this case, that fixed the whole printing problem.  It doesn’t end there, though, being a good geek I checked for Windows updates and other updates.  I also took the opportunity to uninstall the two of the three anti-spyware apps installed (three!).

I have to go back tomorrow because the machine hasn’t had XP SP2 installed yet.  Whew!

You know the saying, “Too many cooks spoil the broth.”? Same goes for computers, “Too many geeks, bork the system.”  There have been several people working on these machines, and a number of well meaning people “doing stuff” too.  This is probably why there were two version of Acrobat Reader and three anti-spyware apps installed.

So remember when something doesn’t work, check to make sure there aren’t conflicting versions, check to make sure its updated, and if you have to call in a geek, try to keep calling the same one.  Oh, and if you figure out what a geek like to snack on and have they around for him/her when they work on your machine—you’ll keep your geek friendly (I like anything chocolate or homebaked).

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