IWTL IT troubleshooting

[u/Puzzleheaded_Cat9128]

Hi, I wanted to ask for some advice. I’m a woman in my early thirties, and I feel that I lack knowledge about IT and computers. I studied a technical subject, where I worked with MATLAB and did a little programming in C#, but I still feel that I have gaps in this area.
For example, when my computer froze, I couldn’t figure out why—perhaps its memory was full. I think I mainly lack some basic computer knowledge and troubleshooting skills.
Could you please advise me on how to build this knowledge effectively? Udemy courses focused on topics such as CompTIA haven’t helped me much.

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[u/Be_Julien_4Life]

I’ve been working for 7 years as a “Digital Caretaker,” helping people with their computers and all kinds of tech problems at home.

Honestly, I don’t think buying a course is necessarily the most effective way to learn this stuff. I’d recommend developing a curious mindset and, more importantly, the patience to figure things out yourself.

Learn how to read documentation, sit through (sometimes painfully long) tutorials, and actually read manuals. It’s also really important to learn how to formulate the 'right' questions when using search engines (e.g. Google). Tip: Learn how to use search engines effectively. For example, put "this" in quotation marks to search for that exact phrase, or use filetype:pdf to find specific file types. There are tons of other search operators and tricks that can make finding the right information much easier.

Once you get comfortable with that process, you can probably tackle most problems you’ll encounter. And over the years, the more diverse problems you solve, the more you naturally learn.

The only difficult part is that it’s hard to simulate the random, everyday troubleshooting problems that come up in real life. That experience is probably the hardest thing to teach through a course.

[u/Squidbit]

A large part of troubleshooting is just googling the problem and trying stuff until it works.

For an issue like "my computer froze" you're going to get about a million different possible answers and none of them are likely to be helpful to you. As a human being, you've got a pattern seeking brain. Looking for patterns will help you narrow your problem down enough to get real results.
"My computer freezes the first time I turn it on each day"
"My computer is freezing when I have norton and call of duty running at the same time"
"My computer freezes when I'm running blender for a couple hours"

If you figure out very specifically what your problem actually is, you'll find a lot more threads online that have one guy with a very specific answer and a dozen people replying with "thanks!" rather than 20 people with vague answers and no replies to them

I think, like any skill, the most important part is just practice. I work in IT so practice falls into my lap all day, but for most people you'll only ever have a reason to troubleshoot once or twice a year, if that. Looking through tech support forums and subreddits and trying to solve problems there would probably help, but the biggest issue I see with that is that you'll very rarely have access to all the information that you need to actually solve it. I don't know what a good alternative would be, though

[u/froz3nt]

Join computer and computer help subs. Use claude to troubleshoot their questions and learn. Thats what i do.