I had an experience Tuesday where I tried helping my dad troubleshoot his laptop. It reminded me of a lesson taught in my IS 101 class. A while back we learned about things to consider when buying a device, such as how comfortable you are with fixing your device. Now even further back, my dad's laptop's screen turned blank out of nowhere. In order to use the laptop, we connected it to the TV with an HDMI cord.
Okay, now for this week. My dad needed to download something for work but after downloading it, everything turned black and only the cursor was visible. After some research with a little trial and error, we came up with forcing the computer to shutdown 3 times in a row. This forces computers to try to find and analyze any problems. I was able to get the command prompt up and found the code to start the computer in safe mode, which only allows basic functions. From there we were going to uninstall the program and hopefully fixing the screen. At the time, I didn't consider if the HDMI port is a basic component. Now we're in safe mode, but have no way of seeing anything. The lesson I learned is to think of the outcome, we're not always able to undo our actions. Sometimes a carefully thought out plan is required.
