Pay Attention

     A good physician listens to the patient and observes. Often, a little quiet observation offers clues that the most exotic tests might miss.
     It's the same with computers. Pay attention to error messages, and watch and listen for anything out of the ordinary.
     If you get an error message, type the exact text of the message-inside quote marks-into a good search engine such as Google. You'll allmost certainly be taken to pages that explain the problem. It may not be one you can fix, but at least you' ll have a clue about it.
     Sounds are big deals, too. for instance a hard disk going bad has a distinctive clatter. That sound should be enough to warn you to save your information to CDs, DVDs or an extermal hard disk.
     Your computer may also literally attempt to tell you the nature of the problem. Honest. If your computer is acting up and also making beeping noises, those beeps may be coded messages that tell you what's wrong.
     While not every manufacturer users the same code, most use one devised in the early days by IBM. In that code, for instance, repeated long beeps signal a memory error and one long beep and two short ones are a sign of a video problem.
     Despite the way it seems at times, computers are very logical machines. When something goes wrong, it's often the result of a change you made-anything from installing s new program, to adding a printer, to a little do-it-youself fixing.
     When something goes wrong, think back to the last change you made. Often you can get things back to normal by undoing that change.