Be Your Own Tech Support

Everyone has at least one friend who knows “everything” about computers. Any problem that you have with any piece of software or hardware, they seem to know the answer.  But I’m about to let out a big secret that my technological colleagues won’t thank me for — they don’t know everything!  What they do know is how to start looking for the right answers.

It’s almost guaranteed that any problem or question you’re having with your computer has happened to someone at least once before. And hopefully they (or the product companies themselves) have documented it somewhere on the internet.

An easy and quick method to begin your search is to use Google. Go tohttp://www.google.com (or www.google.de if you prefer to search in German — can be helpful if you have a German operating system and you get errors in German!) and enter your problem or question into the search field.  Here are some suggestions for getting the best (i.e. most relevant) results.

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Using Images from the Web Under the Creative Commons…

Many images can be found on the internet that are published under the so called “Creative Commons” license. This means that as long as you credit the original image as specified by the image author, you can alter and use it without paying any royalties.

Wikipedia maintains a full collection of images published under this license, which is a great go-to place to find pictures of just about anything.  And most of the pictures on any topic in wikipedia itself are covered under this license. So I’d recommend two methods for searching for these images:

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