When tech drives you crazy, don't make the problem worse.
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom
here for askleo.com. Some time ago, I was helping someone with their
computer, as I do, and as I do, I was kind of muttering to myself itself.
There was a problem.
And as I was examining the system,
which hadn't really had any good maintenance done on it for some time,
it was clear that there were other random things going on.
And I would be muttering to myself, you know, well, that's odd,
or I wonder if that's related to the problem or whatever.
And the person whom I was helping had a very common reaction.
Unfortunately, I consider it to be a very dangerous reaction as well.
That knee jerk reaction, turn it off, get rid of it, delete it.
It's the knee jerk reaction that basically
assumes all problems are horrific and only worst case solutions.
Getting rid of things, throwing things away, stop doing things,
even getting a new computer are the right things to do.
Now, to be clear, occasionally, occasionally they are.
It's what makes this life interesting.
But most of the time, they are not.
Most of the time, things are not that, for lack of a better term, simple.
We want simple.
We want simple and fast solutions.
And unfortunately, I honestly believe that that's part of our problem.
We want things to be simple and we want things to be easy.
And if they're not, throw it all away in times of frustration.
Yeah, I can get that.
Sometimes it does feel good to delete or uninstall or throw into the bin.
But the fact is, oftentimes jumping to those kind
of conclusions actually ends up creating worse problems than it solves.
It ends up using more time than would otherwise have been spent.
It really is the wrong thing to do.
My advice, the reason I'm recording this video is simply this slow down.
Rarely are these things so critical
that you need to take action, like in an instant.
Slow down.
Take the time to more carefully research,
understand, and potentially find the much simpler
solution that is often lurking beneath this horrific surface.
Get help if you need to.
I understand that horrific surface can seem insurmountable and complex
and whatever, but the bottom line is that by taking
the time to do the work, to take a breath, to carefully examine what's going
on and look for solutions, honestly, it's time better spent.
And it's typically less time than some of the more extreme solutions.
Honestly, I am surprised at how often
something that seems incredibly complicated and incredibly broken and you
know, oh my gosh, how are we going to fix this kind of a thing?
Turns out to be something super simple.
It may be well hidden, it may be completely unintelligible.
Technology is not known for making the important stuff as visible as it
should be or using terminology that you and I can easily understand.
But nonetheless, it's not uncommon for that to be the case.
The difference between simple and what
I've called the nuclear option is taking the time to do the research.
Now, in the case of the person I was
helping, we kind of went both ways on this.
The problem they were facing actually turned out to be a checkbox.
Literally.
It was one of those things where, oh yeah, you bury down in here,
you dig through that, you find this and oh yeah, change that checkbox.
And the problem that the individual had come to me with was gone.
The magic was not in the solution.
The magic was in finding the solution, in diagnosing the problem.
However, all those other things
I did end up telling them, you know, if this were my machine,
yeah, I'd back up, I'd reformat and I'd reinstall windows from scratch.
There's just enough things hinky about the machine, about the windows set up over
time that a complete reinstall would probably solve a number of problems.
Now, that's not always the solution, but sometimes it's the pragmatic solution.
I say pragmatic because, yes, you could spend a lot of time looking
into specific problems and drilling down into understanding, oh yeah,
this problem is caused by that, this problem is caused by that.
I can solve these one at a time.
There's a tradeoff.
There's a point at which all
of that research is going to take more time than just reformat reinstall.
Reformat reinstall is painful,
don't get me wrong, but sometimes the research leads you down
a path that is so long and convoluted it's not worth the effort.
So which is it?
Do I do the research and look
for that simple solution or do I nuke it and reformat and reinstall?
Like I said earlier, things aren't that simple.
We want simple answers.
There are no simple answers. Slow down.
The important thing is to slow down,
not have those knee jerk reactions that have you do anything.
Specifically, take the time,
understand what the problem is and determine what the appropriate
solution is going to be for your situation.
And yes, if that means reaching out for help to ask Leo to a friend,
to other sites on the Internet, to whatever, do that.
But please don't take that knee jerk reaction
that everything's gone to heck and we should just throw it all away because
honestly, it really does just end up making things worse.
For updates, for comments, for related links and more, visit AskLeo.com/28451.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
And this is AskLeo.com. Thanks for watching.