Assuming its a computer problem, which can sometimes be extremely difficult to pin down, my advice is start with the most obvious fault (eg, "blue screen of death") and search on that & related terms like BSOD. Then see what sort of answers come up,and see if any have other symptoms that relate to other things you've noticed on yours. You could then refinine your own search based on what things seem similar. Keep a supply of nutrients on hand and clear your schedule for a week, if its Windows-related!

Assuming as Vitaliy asked, that that's what you meant!

Aha! Well, use google search to find your computer first. Mine's in my study. Google knows everything!

@oscillian

You are a mean person.

@Vitaliy_Kiselev :-)

@Mark_the_Harp The topic is actually to point out how often people ask about favours they could easily do themselves.

I work at a small(700 students) private college.

For the first year or so that I was here, I was part of the IT staff. Then I got moved to the Communications office to handle the website full time.

Recently, one of our two IT staff decided to leave after being fed up with doing all the work himself. There used to be five people in the IT department but over the past few years when people have left they have cited budget issues and not replaced the staff.

So, For the past few weeks, the remaining IT guy has been asking me random questions about our spam filter, DHCP server, DNS settings, etc... Because I haven't worked in that dept for 3 years, I don't know everything off the top of my head. But all of his questions have been answered in under 5 minutes by either looking in the department documentation or by a quick google search.

Then, half the time that I send him the results of what he's looking for with some detailed information about the issue at hand, he responds telling me that he has no interest in learning that stuff because he doesn't have the time.

I'm not sure why he doesn't have the time because looking at the IT helpdesk database, which happens to run on my server, in the past 4 months he's only closed about 75 tasks compared to the guy who left having closed over 250.

Some times you just can't do anything to help someone if they aren't interested in learning for themselves.

"why does my GH2 say "no valid picture to display" when I copied over the latest driftwood hack .ini file to my SD card?"

@Vitaliy_Kiselev Spot on!

@oscillian Found them!

Last week at work we had a message on our printer that the waste toner bottle was full and we needed to call the equipment leasing company.

I reminded my boss that the business office had decided to not pay for a service contract on our machine and that we could probably replace the WTB ourselves but she said to give them a call anyway.

A few minutes later it was confirmed that we didn't have a contract but the equipment company would look into what it would take to replace the WTB.

I went ahead and ordered a replacement WTB online and replaced it, which took about 15 seconds, a couple of days ago for a total cost of $36.

This afternoon I had a voice mail from the "technician" at the equipment company saying that he had looked into our problem and the cost for the part was $72.72, and the labor and mileage to make the service call would put the total at $245.06.

I must be in the wrong line of work.

Google is testing a new knowledge graph interface for showing a timeline of data, facts and knowledge in the top carousel section of the Google search results.

Florian Kiersch spotted this first and captured a video of it, posting the video on Google+.

The timeline shows you data elements related to your search query. When you hover your mouse over the timeline, Google will show you tidbits of data. If you click on the element, Google will drill into the timeline of that element.

*from Search Engine Land, Jul 28, 2014 *

In my recent experience, Google's poor profiling on me as a consumer have resulted in my urgent search queries returning sh*t results: only by re-doing the search in the (Non-profiling but not much better than Google) IxQuick was I able to find out it some house re-stumping supplies were available in the right sizes in order for me to make some quick changes before some mortar set outside.

(FWIW I'd recently started googling for a new car; just maybe Google's algorithm decided I was so cashed-up I'd be a likely client for a $25,000.00 re-stumping service instead of a $15.00 "Bigfoot" nylon adjustable stump-leveller), ...well dunno and don' care. All I know is I'm about ready to pay real cash for a search engine that doesn't want to sell me anything but good data!