With all the new electronic hardware and software people will be receiving for the holidays in the coming weeks, I thought I would share a little secret on how to fix almost any sort of malfunction. There’s an easy formula to help you remember it, too.
Think of the last romantic comedy you’ve seen. Chances are at some point the main characters get into a fight or somehow it looks like they’ll never get together. Just as all seems lost, the person who messed up does something romantic and/or quirky to win the other person back. “How about we start over from the beginning?” one of them will inevitably say when they’ve decided to give it another shot.
Despite it’s redundancy, you must remember this important phrase when you’re pulling your hair out over a frustrating technical issue. Internet is slow or keeps freezing? Restart your browser. Restart your computer. Hell, if you’re still having problems, restart your modem. You’ll need to get Al Gore’s permission to restart the Internet itself, however.
You’ve restarted your computer and the program itself, but Photoshop is still crashing? Create a new file. “But if I create a new file I’ll lose hours of work!” you scream minutes before your deadline. Hey, I never said this would be easy. Especially not for procrastinators (yet like the secretly sensitive bad boy and the deceptively innocent school girl, somehow procrastinators and unstable electronics always seem to find each other).
If you do this, there is a very good chance you’ll have a happy ending, lasting about the same time it does on screen. After these 10-15 minutes of desired functions, chances are you’ll have to “fix” it again. But these are the relationships of our lives that we love to hate.
Okay, perhaps in this case it’s just hate…
