I know its hard to believe it, but the title of this blog is true.  At least for the most part.  So far this month I've had two instances where a customer was having a issues with their PC's that they immediately assumed were related to Windows.  They spent alot of time chasing down the problem and trying fixes that had nothing to do with the cause of the problem.

When everything is working fine and then all of a sudden it isn't, we tend to blame Windows before we blame ourselves.  It's just human nature when owning a PC, even the most tech savvy person can make these assumptions and waste time chasing ghosts.  Here are two problems that I came across recently that almost cost me alot of time trying to fix a problem that was not there.

Client calls and tells me that there laptop's touch pad has stopped working. Ok, I pretty much knew that this was not a Windows problem, but since they were running a beta version of Windows 7, I wasn't 100% sure.  When I got my hands on this laptop, the touchpad sure didn't work.  The last thing I wanted to do was to start unscrewing the laptop and check for a shorted bezel, but in the back of my mind, I had a feeling that's where we were headed.  I checked all the drivers and they were ok, plugging a USB mouse in worked fine.  Perplexing.  After looking at the laptop closely for a plan off attack to get to the hardware, I noticed a blue finger icon on the F7 key, kinda resembled a touchpad.  So I clicked Fn + F7 and wouldn't you know it, the touch pad worked fine.  The customer accidentally shut it off somehow.  Thankfully I discovered this before I concluded that the hardware was shot, saving both me and the customer much wasted time.   

Client calls and says she has a virus because her screen is sideways.  This one made me chuckle, but I've been around Microsoft XP long enough to see this one a few times before.  Although she was freaking out, once I told her to try CTRL+ALT+UP, she was back in business.  What had happened was, she turned her keyboard over to change the batteries and accidentally changed the orientation of her screen.  We laughed and she saved some money by not having to call a tech to her house.

There are many situations like these two that we automatically think the worst and in the end it ends up being something very simple.  Blaming Microsoft Windows for all our issues is commonplace, but some of time, it may just be user error. It's OK, we won't tell anybody....