Everyone is an expert....

Submitted by Rick on March 3, 2006 - 8:27pm.

I put gas in my truck every week, but I'm not a car expert. We raised some goats from 'kids' to their adulthood, but I'm not a farm or goat expert. It always strikes me as funny when some folks who merely 'use' computers think they are computer experts.

Today, a client of mine illustrated this point perfectly. He has a widescreen Compaq laptop (not the typical almost square monitor). The icons and text on his monitor looked a little squashed and blocky. He wanted me to look at it because a friend of his told him that that was indication that the hard drive was going to crash soon and he should be careful. 

One glance at the laptop and I could have fallen over laughing...but I didn't because I try to be a professional and I appreciate my customers immensely. I calmly explained to him that it was a simple setting change that we needed to tweak with regards to the desktop's resolution (the number of pixels that are displayed).

With traditional monitors, common resolutions are 800 X 600, 1024 X 768, etc. With wide-screen laptops, with their larger ratio of width to height, require a different type of resolution setting. It happened that his laptop resolution was set to a traditional setting versus the widescreen setting. One small change, no more squatty icons and text.

"The hard drive is going to crash"...please.

If this helped, consider buying me a beer or an Americano!