Question

**Customer Service Fundamental course**. Problem Solving Skills When Diagnosing Common Software Support Problems

Determining hardware problems are more straightforward than diagnosing common software support problems. Many software problems stem from one or more of the following five sources.

• Improper installation
• Incompatibility
• Configuration problems
• Bugs
• Poor performance

Instructions

An application is running slowly, An application is frozen and All programs on the computer run slowly. What problem solving skills, critical thinking skills, and common end-user support problems are addressed and would be effective for each of the three problems? Include a rationale to justify the steps used. Submit your lists using the upload instructions.

Answer 1

An Application is running slowly

• Check to see if the system is up to date. The app can become unresponsive or it may crash if it is not up to date.
• Check the internet connection. Many apps work a lot better if you have a strong Internet connection.
• The app could possibly have poor coding. Check the source where the app was downloaded from to ensure that it is from a legitimate source which could also cause the software glitch
• Check to see how much free space does the device have. If the device is running out of space, it could cause applications and systems to run slowly.

An application is frozen

• Check to see if it’s a database problem because if the database is bottlenecked, causing queries to run slower than usual.
• Check for possible deadlocks. This is so because if it seems that the application server is doing nothing, look for deadlocks. These can be database deadlocks that cause your SQL queries to hang, or seek the update statements.
• Check for runaway thread. A run-away thread will probably not return until it has already affected the entire application. Therefore, the hanging request will not be written to the log.

All programs on the computer run slowly.

• Reboot the PC first and foremost. This is because the computer could be running for a long time without a reboot.
• Check for free space on the pc. Programs can run slowly if there is not enough free space as it is used to stores files and data, it also functions to allow swap file space and virtual memory required for the programs to operate.
• Check to see if there any background programs running simultaneously. A lot of the time, those programs could be idle but still be running which could cause the other programs to run slowly
• Check to see if Hard drive is corrupted or fragmented (a lot of times this could be caused by not shutting the PC down properly.)