Everyone should know by know that your first line of defense in computer troubleshooting is to restart. If a program is giving you issues, close it and try again. If your computer is running slowly/won't print/won't open a program, restart it and try again. Most computer problems seem to magically go away when you restart.
What should you do if the screen seems too big for the monitor?
Sometimes our patrons open up windows that just seem to be too big for the screen. The window requires you to scroll side to side a lot, or even worse, won't let you scroll at all and just cuts off part of the window. What do you do? Well, try changing the screen resolution. Making the screen resolution higher will cause the items on the screen to look smaller (change from 800x600 to 1024x768 for example), and allow everything to fit on the screen as it should. Follow the tutorial here to find out how to change the screen resolution on an XP computer. You may have to close the window and open it again to make the changes take effect.
If you are having trouble getting a patron computer to send something to the printer, I have had some success with deselecting the printer and selecting it again. For example, go to "file" and "print", which should bring up the print options screen. At the top it will have a place to select the printer to send the file to. Change this to another printer on the list, and then switch it back to the Public Monitor printer. Click "apply" at the bottom, and then "print" to send the file to the printer. This doesn't always work, but it is worth a shot.
I'll be focusing on this later, but here is Windows tutorial on how to connect to a wireless network. When I do the technology petting zoo, you all will get to try this for yourselves. Note: Be careful with patron laptops! Do not change anything that you are not familiar with, and do not hesitate to come find me if you are not comfortable fiddling with someone else's piece of expensive machinery.
And last but not least, Keyboard shortcuts. Some of these may take some getting used to, and may take longer than the manual way until you get used to them, but a lot of these are lifesavers for me. CTRL+C (copy) and CTRL+V (paste) especially. Another of my favorites is CTRL+T, which opens up a new browsing tab in both IE and Firefox.
Your task: Explore these Windows tips and tricks. Were you already familiar with any of these? Do any of these seem especially helpful? Any other things you wish you knew how to do in XP? I'll try to provide answers in the comments here. Also, if you have any tips or tricks for us, please share!
Bonus link:
Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User. This blog post on the NYT has a massive 55 pages of comments where readers share their own tips.
How to communicate with IT. Sometimes it's hard to express your computer problems to myself or Gary, especially over the phone. This article has some pretty good tips on helping us help you.
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