There is nothing more frustrating than starting your day in the office and your computer is acting up. You have deadlines, you have to answer emails but your pc does not seem to cooperate. We have been called very often in Westchester county to assist users early in the morning because their machines had issues that they were not able to resolve with a single reboot. What is even more frustrating is that not always computer problems can be resolved with a remote session, but company employees have to wait for a tech to come over to solve the problems.
Is to hire an IT firm that conducts computer business locally so that computer support in person may not be late when problems arise.
Let us Know if you Need IT SupportA typical day in the office begins with employees arriving to the headquarters and trying to login into their Windows account. A typical office has workstations running Windows 10 or 11 and users’ accounts are managed by one or two Activer Directory servers. The common issues that office suers are experiencing can be described as follows:
User Cannot Login into their Workstation
That issue has usually to do with users not rememberiung their login password and in that case a Windows system administrator can create a temporary new password for the user. After having input the temporary password, users can create a new password that would have to comply with the lenght and complexity required by the company’s password policy.
User Reports that the Computer is Turned Off
In this case, a tech would first try to turn on the computer and see if the monitors as well power up. If the computer turns on, users may be forced to go past Bit Locker and then login. Another attempt can be if the tech support in place can try to unplug the power cord, keep pressed the power button for 15 seconds to discharge extra power and try to reboot the machine. If all fails, the computer technician should see if there are Bios errors or if the system does not load. It happened to us that we had to replace computers quickly for a client in new Rochelle because after the Bios post, the system would not load because of corrupted files.
User Cannot Print
Solving printing issues seems easy but in reality it’s a very tricky troubleshooting task. First you may want to check if user has tried to print multiple times and his/her print queue is full with print jobs. Clear all the print jobs, reboot the pc and see if the printer is set as default printer in the Windows control panel and if the printer drivers are properly installed. If you have a Windows server that manages print jobs through a Group Policy Object, you may want to check that as well and eventually reboot the server if users cannot print.
User Has No Internet
Troubleshooting Internet in a small office is not the same as trying to understand why you don’t have Internet at home. A small business office may have several routers, switches and firewalls, and IT technicians have to deal with each individual appliance to see what’s going on. Usually tech support in Westchester login into the GUI of those appliances by typing their IP address. If one of those appliances does not let you login, you may want to focus on that as a temporary single point of failure.
User Has not Received an Attachment from another User
Usually the issue occurs when a user sends a pdf or a large excel file to another user via email. As the sender is not aware of the attachment size limitation, the receiver will never get the file. In this case, although Microsoft One Drive and Google Drive are 7 years old, users still don’t seem to realize that it will be better to use cloud service to send attachments. As a matter of fact a cloud provider will send to the receiver a link to download the file from a cloud server and not the physical file.
User Cannot Login into their VOIP Phones
Nowadays tech support in Westchester needs to be able to troubleshoot VOIP phones as part of their core competencies. Users usually forget their extension number so it would be a good idea if computer people keep a copy of the company phones’ directory and guide user to the phone login process. If a new user is onboarded or terminated we recommend to outsource the phone systems to a cloud phone company who can create, reassign and delete users’ numbers in a more orderly fashion.
Computer Monitors are Turned Off
Monitors are usually not turned off but they are isle. I would check the connection, restart the computer and see if the picture comes up. If the picture does not showe up I would check the input source in the monitor itself, which can be DVI, VGA or HDMI. If all those fail I would eventually replace the monitor cable with a new one.
Computer Running Slow
If the computer runs slow, there are serveral things to check before taking action. Check the hardware first: as we have seen some of our Westchester clients buying computers with Intel Core i3 processor, there won’t be that much to do because that machine was born to be slow. If, on the other hand, the computer or laptop has a Intel Core I5 or Core I7, tech support may want to uninstall unused programs, turn off software and services from the startup menu that are not needed such as Xbox, run Windows updates, browser updates and Microsoft Office updates. A good way to free up some storage is to cleanup the download folder and to empty the recycle bin.