Learning Technicalities

Hi

Can be a mix of learning sources, but if you want a job in computing then college/uni is your way unless some companies are willing to offer apprenticeships. If you wish to learn for your own knowledge and maybe to help others online or locally in your community, friends, reletives etc then online learning is good.

To really do this yourself, its good to have an old PC you can build up from scratch to learn how hardware fits together and how you get it working with an Operating System this can be Windows or a Linux variant, good to do both. This then becomes your testbed PC to test out what you read in the way of what the registry is and how it is structured, to the command line commands to group policy, to then general troubleshooting.

Some info on CMD commands HERE and info on the Windows Registry HERE (do note the registry can be a place that will with one wrong deletion, could crash Windows)

bookmark these two as they are a bit of the bible on Windows - TechNet and MSDN.
Could also read the info in past topics HERE and HERE and even its from Vista days but still highlights how Windows uses the Kernel in two parts, HERE from Mark Russinovich


So basically its a lot of reading from good sources of info and testing things out yourself, if something goes wrong in the test then good chance to try and fix it. Read up on how others say on Majorgeeks have fixed other users issues, what was the issue, and how was it fixed, make notes on various issues and the fix in Word, Notepad and save them off with file names of the issue so you can find them again.

If you don't have a spare PC but do have a licenced old version of Windows still, then use a Virtual Machine (VirtualBox for example) and create a virtual PC to allow you to fiddle around and test tweaks and fixes out, I tend to do this as it allows me to try and recreate someone's issue and test any fixes out so I don't kill my main PC.

No doubt others will add loads more and I will at later date.

 

Experimentation and research is the key to getting ahead in tech, even before going for certification.

Going to add beta testing here as well as this has been a great route into problem solving not only the OS but the software being tested with an OS. I found being in the technical betas for XP, Vista, Win 7 and 8 very valuable, also dealt with Office, Security Essentials, Windows Live Essentials to name a few from http://connect.microsoft.com/ sign up and see what's available to test, actually not much at present, but you never know.

Also many 3rd party companies from anti-virus to games ask for volunteers to test their software and feedback, the more you actively feedback and give good bug reports the more you end up being asked for other betas. SO check out your favoured apps and see if they have a beta program and join it.

Mozilla have a big program that in the main anyone can join and feedback, just need to get the latest versions and test and feedback any bugs, but try and recreate a bug, write as much down as possible, what OS hardware, and error messages/issues and take screenshots as well of bugs, but also give suggestions on improvements you may think of.

Very true indeed.