Google as Tech Support

I probably didn’t need yet another reminder of how valuable Google has become but I got one this week.

I’ve been having a problem with the CD ROM drive on my kids computer. It would work right after a clean boot up, but would crap out shortly after. I tried troubleshooting the drive as best I could by checking to see if I had a conflict under device manager and making sure that Windows recognized it at boot-up.

When I’d try to view the properties of the drive a cryptic error message popped up. The first couple of times I just canceled out of the error and went looking for a solution elsewhere. Finally, nearing wits end, I decided to type the error message into Google and shouldn’t have been surprised to see a link to a forum that provided the fix. An older version of Nero was conflicting with a newer version and I had to remove two registry entries. I was up and running in under 2 minutes.

This is one thing that’s so great about Google. It helps me fix my computer, even when presented with cryptic error messages that only a programmer could understand. I wish Windows were smart enough to give me a message that says something like, “Uninstall older version of Nero” instead of an error code full of numbers. But Google took those numbers and linked me to a solution.

I’m to the point now that if Google can’t find the solution to a computer problem, I would just replace the part, assuming no fix existed.