by Charles Miller

My good friend Dave recently did something very few professional computer techs ever have a chance to do, and I will come back to why in due course. First, an abbreviated account of the problem Dave was having with his Windows PC.

The problem first manifested itself one day when Dave tried to print something and his printer was offline. At first it seemed the only solution was to reboot his computer immediately before printing, but Dave did not want to do this every time he needed to print. I did not have any solution to offer, but Dave and I discussed some possibilities and he kept me informed about what he was doing as he worked through trying to fix the problem.

Dave is a trained engineer and he approached troubleshooting the problem in the methodical way an engineer should. That produced pages of carefully documented notes as he doggedly spent dozens of hours trying to fix his printer problem. Consulting ChatGPT he followed dozens of suggested solutions, none of which worked.

As the problem dragged on for weeks, Dave carefully observed cause and effect to identify what could be causing this problem. He emailed me three pages of notes documenting the issue, only later to tell me "disregard everything in those notes" because new evidence proved his earlier conclusions to be wrong. The problem was intermittent and could not be reproduced with a simple and repeatable series of operations. Eventually Dave determined with reasonable certainty that it was Microsoft Word that was turning off the print spooler service so that no other programs could use it, and Microsoft had no solution to offer.

Years ago I had a similar experience when a client was unable to consistently use the "one-click" feature in Microsoft's Outlook email program to send a calendar entry to someone else's calendar on his office network. After I tried and failed to fix that problem, Later, I spent some time online reading lists of troubleshooting procedures, all of which I had already tried, except for the last one.

I noted the troubleshooting checklists, mostly authored by corporate computer support workers, never had more than just a few suggestions and all the lists ended with the same one. "Contact your company's network administrator to requisition a new computer." That made it clear to me that the computer techs providing support in corporate offices with hundreds of computers simply do not have time to do what Dave did… spend dozens of hours on one problem. In the corporate world the problem has to be fixed before the user of that computer loses another hour of working time. If the computer tech cannot quickly resolve any problem in 5 or 6 or 10 steps, then the last step is to give up and replace the computer with another one that does not have the same problem (yet).

As software such as Microsoft's Windows 11 and Microsoft Office 360 have grown in complexity, it has become true that there is a growing list of known problems that never get fixed. Contributing to this is the fact that there are not enough Daves in the world, and professional IT techs are constantly under pressure to resolve problems under time constraints that do not allow adequate time to find answers to some problems.

So the reason ChatGPT never came up with the right answer is that the answers do not always exist. So long as the corporate troubleshooting checklists end with "requisition a new computer" and so long as consumers recognize the reality that buying a new computer is sometimes less expensive than fixing their old one, there are going to be software problems for which nobody ever finds a solution.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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