Something I have noticed that prevents a lot of people from starting their own business is that they believe that they need to know it all before they start a business. Let me tell you a little secret, don’t need to know it all, you just need to know enough and make it look like you know what you are doing.

I have a friend who has his own successful teaching business and is a great example of not needing to know it all. He teaches a certain topic and knows his particular topic quite well. However, he occasionally teaches a side topic to those who want it which complements the main topic. He told me that all he did was just bought a book, reads each chapter one week in advance and teaches what he learnt the next week. It may sound stupid but makes good money out of it.

As for my story of not knowing it all, when I first started my own computer business I knew how to fix many common computer problems but I lacked real onsite experience. At the time there was a lot of issues that I hadn’t encountered before that a experienced technician would see all the time.

I accepted the majority of these jobs because you can’t get experience unless you actually do them. To be fair to my clients I had a fairly low rate to begin with and I didn’t charge for any “learning time”. If there was a problem I couldn’t fix because of my lack of knowledge I wouldn’t charge the customer at all.

Most of the problems I have encountered can be solved by either reading the instructions that came with the problem device or just by searching Google since there is a good chance that someone else has encountered this problem before, and solved it.

Even today, with my 7 years of professional experience I still come across problems and devices I have never worked with before; a couple of days ago while I was on site fixing various computer issues at a business and they asked me if I could take a look at one of their faulty touch screens. I told them that touch screens “wasn’t really my specialty” which is my way of saying I’ve never worked with them, but I would take a look at it anyway.

The problem with the touch screen was that the screen wasn’t responding to touches and that everything appeared to be blue. Sure enough, a few minutes I managed to fix it.

I understood that touch devices like the iPhone work by detecting our electrical current but I didnt know how this setup would interface with a computer. I found out that touch screens are just regular screens with a special USB powered overlay that detects the presses. In hindsight it was fairly simple, I just hadn’t worked with them before.

The reason why the screen wasn’t responding to touches was because the software that listens for it couldn’t detect the USB part of the screen. I just told the touch screen software to rescan for the device, chose the correct monitor and it was working again. I also showed the client how to do it if it ever happened again.

Although the touching part of the screen was easy to fix, locating the source of the color problem was a little harder and I had to make use of a skill that you do need in this job; Deductive reasoning.

Deductive reasoning is the process of eliminating potential causes of the problem until you find the solution. In the case of this LCD screen, this was my thought process:

The screen itself was located in a public kiosk area and the host computer was in an office out the back. The host computer had a VGA cable going from the video card to the wall and then a cable traveled through the roof into the kiosk area where there was a VGA plug. Then, there was the VGA cable going from the wall socket to the screen itself.

When I first started diagnosing it I suspected the screen itself was faulty but I checked the video card of the host computer to begin with. I made sure that the video software settings were correct and I plugged a nearby screen into the same video card, the colors were fine. So I established that it’s not a video card problem on the host computer.

I then removed the touch screen from the kiosk room and connected it directly to the computer to test screen itself, again, the colors were fine so the issue wasn’t the screen. This means that the issue is either being caused by the cable in the roof or the cable between the computer and the wall.

I brought my own test LCD screen into the office and used their host-to-wall VGA cable to plug in my screen into the host computer. When I powered up my screen I discovered that my screen was now having the blue color issue so it is obvious that the cable they are using is faulty in some way. I inspected their VGA cable and discovered it had a bent pin. I tried to straighten the pin with a pair of tweezers but it was too badly damaged so I sold them a new one.

The problem was solved, I got paid and the client was happy. Before I started I didn’t know that touch screens were just regular LCDs with a USB powered overlay and I can use that knowledge learnt for future touch screen related jobs. That’s how you gain the experience that eventually turns a beginner into an experienced technician, you just need to start.