Management Insights
Step One in Software Troubleshooting
By Eric A. Spanitz
Mar 30, 2006, 22:10

Today one of our valued writers pointed out that she could no longer control the spacing and font settings in this article system.  Because nothing had changed on our end (on the website) I had to do some checking.

I did remember that a few weeks ago I heard of another fellow website enthusiast complimenting Microsoft on a recent useful update to Internet Explorer .

I checked with my copy of Internet Explorer (which I never use, so would not have noticed) (everyone - get a real browser - and I highly recommend Opera and Mozilla) and found that indeed some major functionality was missing from our article system.  Logically what Microsoft taketh away must surely be returned by some setting or option.  No.  Indeed not.

After fussing with files on my end (a complete waste of time) and looking for non-existent "give me back that functionality" registry settings, I thought about checking for an update to the article writing software itself.  Surely other people had run into this problem.

Indeed they had - back in November of 2005.  The fix came out that month, and the super-fix with additional bells and whistles came out a month later.

Basic (formal) software trouble-shooting saved the day:

1.   Check for user error - can the problem be repeated with a different human on a different computer with different software setup?

2.   Check for client updates - has the local (where the human is sitting) computer software been updated?  If so, could that update have caused the problem?

3.   Check for server / network updates - is there a fix for the network or server to handle some issue with a client software situation?

4.   Double check the directions for installation - sometimes a setting which is incorrect seems to "work" or is tolerated by the system but causes problems after the system software has been updated.  With our article system on this website, apparently our IT guy (ahem) set the directory structure wrong.  I will be more careful in the future.  RTFD (read the * documentation)


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