By "chatting" can I assume you mean an instant messaging service of some
It is "chat" in the general computer-related sense.
I was not clear with my question. What application (program) do you use
for this chat.
Negative.
Negative.
I was referring to individuals who assist me not always considering that
such information would be necessary and, therefore, not presenting
inquiries, which would necessitate my providing the data beforehand.
Remember that many of the people on the forum work in many other forums
and breeze through quickly answering as many threads as they can in the
limited time that they have for this. Often, they can give a reasonable
and appropriate answer by just noting a keyword or two from the post as
the same questions are asked over and over because many people who post
for help do not have the experience and/or inclination to search
previous posts for a problem similar or even exactly like their own.
Many intelligent and experienced experts consider tedious the task of
eliciting sufficient information from the poster, although, they may be
very knowledgeable and would be able to fix the problem quite quickly if
faced with it on site. There are even those with not very logical
thinking who show a measure of success in computer repair, some of them
wouldn't realize what information to ask you for. There are also those
who have no desire to "spoon feed" novices who aren't appearing to take
sufficient responsibility and effort in the fix. Lastly, there are those
who are not really here to help you, rather to meet their own,
unspecified, needs.
The situation you describe would be the norm. Often, the assumption is
made that prior to seeking help on the forum, one has already checked
all of the simple possibilities and eliminated them as the source of the
problem. This is generally not the case when it is obvious from the
posters question that they know very little about computers, however,
when someone presents as somewhat knowledgeable, that assumption may be
valid. It usually does take a level of sophistication above the average
to find one's way to the technical newsgroups in the first place.
For example, you posted with a list of symptoms and I imagine most who
looked at your post made the assumption that you had a connection
problem. Many, if not most, computer problems are simple rather than
complex. As we have already determined, you left out critical
information that you were still able to connect to the shares, yet it
appears from the context of your answers to me that you had already
determined that information through some other process. As I'm sure you
realize at this point, it is vital to give a lot of detailed information
if you have it, being careful to leave out any of your own
interpretation of what the data means, thereby, letting others
troubleshoot according to their own personal style. To put it simply,
think in terms of the necessary and sufficient conditions under which
the fault occurs.
[an aside: If I was on site with your problem, the first thing I would
have done would have been look at the connection lights on the NIC's (if
they are separate cards rather than integrated with the mainboard) to
see if the connection was still up. After establishing that the
connection was active I would have moved on to other things and not
bothered with things like network protocols. If I knew I could still
connect to the shares I wouldn't even have to look at the lights or
consider the hardware or network software.]
As I mentioned previously, it is to your advantage when requesting help
to give as full and detailed a description of the fault as possible and
any information you have about the rest of the subsystem involved,
including what you have already tried and the results of that trial.
Sometimes even the computer make or version of software can be
important, however, I think you provided enough of that in this case.
Rodney
