Discussion on:

10 habits of superstitious users

..user see "fatal error" or "illegal operation" and get really upset, take screenshots, open a helpdesk ticket, notify their supervisor and myself and generally get very worried about what just happened. It's understandable, "fatal" and "illegal" are pretty heavy words, but it still cracks me up every time.

When I was serving in the US Navy we had a saying about the equipment I worked that went along the lines of "If you aren't bleeding it won't work." When it is true 99% of the time you usually find it may have a basis in fact such as there being such tight areas for you to have to torque a screw down and numerous sharp edges that the likelihood of being able to get it fastened properly without shedding blood is often infinitesimal.

You're right expect for the part about users being smarter than pigeons.
I know, cheap shot but I could'nt help myself.

Speaking of magic...I always tell my users that computers run on smoke & mirrors and that until you see the magic smoke leak out the computer can be fixed.

sometimes you see someone trying to blow smoke up another's @#! & they both seem to believe it.

in your power supply has ruptured and we'll have to get a new one to you... =)

I love all the old ones

Dude, you are so lucky.

Taking screenshots is one of the simplest things a user can do and also serves to provide the exact text of an error message for IT in the event of a problem. However, none of us, not even you, knew how to take a screen shot until someone else either showed us or told us or we read about it somewhere. How hard would it be for you to teach your users this and maybe a few other helpful tricks that would make all of your lives easier?

The first time I took a screenshot was on my old Tandy Color Computer 3 (which I still have, and it still works a treat!) - I needed a screenshot (which obviously didn't exist yet) so I wrote a program to do just that & print it (graphically) on my dot matrix printer.

No-one showed me, it didn't exist at the time, and yet I figured it out on my own.

I work with a lot of people who are really good with computers once they're shown. I work with very few people who are good with computers when their sole resource is themselves. That's usually when they stop by my cube.

Ow!! Dammit!! Owwwww!!! I keep hurting my arm, trying to pat myself on the back!!!

Owwwww!!!



Laterz,
"Merch"

i remember upgrading my ram from 64k to 128k... "i'll never need that much, but it looked easy enough to try it", i said to myself.

i wonder whatever happened to Lonnie Falk?

After he left the publishing business, he was elected mayor of Prospect, Kentucky, and if memory serves, he was re-elected to that post several times.

Unfortunately, he passed away a few years back.

There was a push a few years ago to digitize & re-sell all the Rainbow magazines he published, Lonnie was very reasonable about it (there were interests he was beholden to, and he worked hard to make sure all parties were treated fairly), a deal was brokered; work progressed; but he passed on in the middle of the project. Copyright passed on to his family, and they chose not to continue the project (lack of knowledge for the publishing business, etc.).

He will be (and has been) missed.

came with 8kb of memory and I decided to 'upgrade' it and add another 16kb so would have the room to run more stuff. It worked perfectly with my 2200 baud modem! LOL

Yet they always insist on clicking the "OK" or "Cancel" button before taking the screenshot.

Will never forget the customer who, when asked to send in a screenshot of the error message, got out his cell phone/camera, took a picture of the monitor, and sent it in.

Something that just about everyone seems to ignore, with regard to Windows XP, is that using Shift+PrtSc takes a screenshot and stores it on the Windows clipboard. It doesn't do anyone any good there. The person who captures the screenshot must run Microsoft Paint, or some other software, which they can use to store the image in a file. And just how many image formats are available for "graphics files" nowadays?

MS Paint works, but the process of pasting the image from the clipboard to the current display, then using File > Save As takes some time. Unfortunately, the computer and the software do not always give you time to take and store a series of screenshots -- you might not get even one, unless you are lucky.

Or do you know a better, single-step way to take a screenshot??

You need software like ScreenHunter from Wisdom-soft - a single keypress copies the screen to a BMP or JPG. The basic version is free, and I use it frequently. http://www.wisdom-soft.com/

I use PrintKey-Pro from WareCentral. You hit PrtSc and a little app pops up. You can print or save it as is, or drag the mouse across the part you want. Takes seconds.

I always tell my users just to "paste" their screen shot into an e-mail and send it to me. Maybe more than one step, but about as easy as it gets.

Why not train users to paste the screen shot in Word, or Excel, then a simple Files - Send as Attachment? They could also post it in an email client such as Lotus Notes or Outlook. It is a simple copy and paste, no graphic software required unless they are going to edit it.

- it generates a BMP file by default (up to & including XP, I never bothered to find out how Vista deals with it) which is hugely wasteful of bandwidth if you subsequently e-mail the file.

Sadly, it is the only option that everyone has and that you can rely on being available. Just takes a bit of training to get users to create useable screen dumps from it - many do a whole screen capture (Shift-PrtScreen) when all you wanted was the active window itself (Alt-PrtScreen) and then subsequently resize the picture to "email" size, making the text you were interested in, unreadably small!

I use Screenshot Captor. You can get a shot of any portion of the window, scrolling windows, the whole screen or and part you choose with the mouse. The program saves the file by default in .png format.

I find this very useful because it has easy to understand shortcuts to capture all types of screenshots.

It is free (or a donation can be made) but after six months one must re-enter a new key.

I've used several Screenshot utilities. My favorite and most useful is MWSnap. I'll let their website say it best: "...capable of capturing the whole desktop, a highlighted window, an active menu, a control, or a fixed or free rectangular part of the screen. MWSnap handles 5 most popular graphics formats and contains several graphical tools: a zoom, a ruler, a color picker and a window spy. It can be also used as a fast picture viewer or converter."

Use a search engine

will get them if they dont click that button RIGHT AWAY!

Yea, the buttons that says Print Scrn or PrtScr on the keyboard is not very descriptive. They seem to figure out the one that says Delete pretty good by thereself though. Often using it even when they dont want to.

then Windows had a "better idea" - make it do nothing.

Now one must buy 3rd party software to make the Button work, but according to Bill-Almighty, that's the way it's "supposed" to be.

???

The snipping tool does anything the user might need for a screenshot. No additional software needed.

I'm as confounded and, with all due apologies, highly amused by the PrintScreen-doesn't-work comment as I am by the term "by thereself."

It's dead easy to verify whether PrintScreen actually doesn't work, or whether there could be a glitch on the local computer, or whether it might be user error. In any case the title of this reply should provide a clue.

Yeah, even my cat learned how to hit delete after watching me edit text for an hour.

What other tricks would you recommend?

Sneak on to a user's computer when they are away from their desk. Take a screen shot, past it into paint, save it. Then right click on the desktop, select hide icons, and then set the screen shot as the desktop. Final step, slide the start menu and taskbar off the bottom of the screen. No, not nice, but hilarious especially if you let all the co-workers who sit around the target in on the joke.

It is a great trick!

Real trick, teach users to use ALT+PrtSc, this only captures the active window, as opposed to the entire screen, or screens

Well, you've really opened it now. I had a user go downstairs and to the other end of the building to find me "right away!" She had a window she couldn't close, no matter what. I went there and saw that she was reading email and someone sent her a screenshot. No matter how many times she clicked on the "X" in the corner, IT WOULDN'T CLOSE!!!

Same person, another time. All the way to the other end of the building again, and down one floor to find me, and I had to come RIGHT AWAY!!! There was an error message on her screen and an "Okay" button. I read the message to myself several times. I like to try to think like users and get inside their heads, but the more I read the message, the more I kept thinking "they FINALLY put one of these in plain English, it isn't obscure at all." Plus the fact that there was an "Okay" button and NOTHING ELSE. To get into this person's head, I finally had to ask. So I said "What did you think when you read the error message?" She said, "I didn't read it. As soon as it came up I went and got you."

Dumb. And upper management.

there's no other reasonable excuse for hunting you down all over the building.

He's her security blanket. Computers scare her.

That reminds me - Vista includes a little screen-shot program called the "Snipping Tool." We make sure all our users are aware of it, and they love it...simple to use, effective. You can copy/paste, save, mark-up the "snipped" image. Users almost always include "snips" of error messages in email to us and it has really helped to cut-down everyone's frustration level.

It was really nice of MS to leave that little tid-bit in there. Great for error messages, unless it's the dreaded BSOD.

I'm addicted to the stupid thing. Instead of creating reports for trivial non inter active stuff and leaving sensitive info out, I'm notorious for just taking a snip out of my reports.

... teaching, which is hard work sometimes. It also requires patience, which is always hard work.

It's much more fun and much easier to be smug!

That's exactly what I was thinking. That would be a miracle in itself around here.

There is a nice little app called Hoversnap. the cool thing about this is that you will only have to teach your users how to hit the "printscreen" button. once the print screen button has been pressed hoversnap automatically saves the snapshot to a pre-selected folder which you can set up for them with the naming convention that you prefer. must say that this has come in handy with users i have worked with.

I'm not a tech, a used-to-be, wanna-be certificate-baby, who figured out real quick it was gonna-be a never-be and dropped the idea. Belonging here was a teacher's suggestion and I've learned a lot. Your "Hoversnap" is FREAKING AWESOME!! HAHAHA! Loving it!

Yes PrtScr does work and all you have to do once you open Paint is to hit the great big "paste" button in the mostly upper left hand corner. None of this "save-whatever" I read in a comment, just the great big hairy paste button bigger than all by-golly right there. Can't miss it. In fact, no one had ever shown me how to do it, I just knew it involved hitting the key and opening Paint. I just kept messing w/ it 'til it worked. Guess my superstition is a lot of cuss words and a raised voice. ha ha That Alt-Prt-Scr I didn't know about, that's handy. When I buy things and you're supposed to "print off" the confirmation # or whatever, I just printscreen it. I can't scare up $50 for ink these days.

Actually, y'all wouldn't get away w/ the smoke thing w/ me, but I do have my "wha??" moments. I USED to be able to call my son, but TN to MD is a heckuva a long way to come to fix a computer!

But hey, this has been a fascinating read so far. Thanks for that program!
~Christine~

software that even shows a little thumbnail of what they will be taking a screenshot of...but they still don't seem to understand how to do it.....it's like "click this button here"...geez.

There are some that catch on though...I've received emails from some with embedded screen shots & asking a question.....for those people I take the time to get a little fancier & use "Alt" "PrintScreen" to just take the "active" window....they usually reply & ask how you do that....you tell them & they start using it...I like those users, but there isn't enough of them out there.

We purchased a site license for Printkey 2000 a long time ago and users are pretty good about using it. It is kindof hard to screw it up though when all you do is hit the printkey button and then press the big print button on the software that pops up to get a paper copy. Asking some users to email you the screenshot is a whole different story. Once I had a user print out a screenshot, then put it in their scanner to get an image of it, and then finally attached the scanned image of the screenshot to an email to me.

My favorite is the power of the tech...you walk in, and by your magical presence the computer is fixed. I get that one a lot. I'm quite sure that with minimal effort, I could find an example of any of them, though.
Great list...had to share it with all the techs I work with.

Although my profession isn't really tech-based, we rely quite heavily on our network and workstations. And, of course, I am the lone IT guy here. A few of my fellow employees swear up and down that they are having a problem with their computer, but that it ALWAYS works when I'm standing there.

I tell them that most people don't really understand computers because they try to be nice to them. You must strike some fear into the computer. The reason all the computers work for me, I tell them, is because they know I can turn them all into toasters.

Once we're done laughing, I explain the reality of the situation, and that there is such a thing as a "random glitch" or connectivity problem.

Magical presence is something I see since 10 years ago or more. Now with computers, in the past with electronics.

"When you are here, everything works great"... nice!!!!

I will start to use your words: "is because they know I can turn them all into toasters."

But it all comes down to the ole adage that my dad use to use...It never makes that sound when you take it to the mechanic.....

is to find something else that is wrong.

I always thought that the first job of a mechanic (or an IT professional) is to make the client not feel completely stupid. Always finish this step with "I see this all the time."

Once you're done with that simple task, move on to explaining the "possible problem" with incredible amounts of technical jargon. And always make sure your voice is dripping with authority, so they would feel stupid to question you!

the first job of the Mechanic was to read the Diagnostic Error Codes

which, like compiler errors, often have little or nothing to do with the real problem, and send the mechanic off on a fruitless, needless, and expensive repair of something that isn't broken.