How a Changing Workplace is Affecting Windows Troubleshooting

The last time I worked in an office, if anybody had asked the management about the possibility of ever working from home, or spending a day sitting in a café in the sunshine to work on a project for the company, the answer would have been a very swift, and very decisive “No!”  Oh, how times have changed.

The Shift in Computing Habits

I don’t think I need to remind you about the world event that brought about those changes, but for those people working in IT Support and supporting Windows PCs it has thrown up unexpected challenges.  The world of computing and our use of the internet has changed in the recent past, this was brought about by the advent of the iPhone and the iPad.

The Impact of Mobile Devices 

If you think back, or are old enough to remember, if you had a computer at home you had a desktop PC sitting either in a corner of the living room, or in the spare room as an office.  As time moved on these were slowly replaced by laptops, and for a while netbooks like the super-cute Asus Eee PC (my wife had one of those; Ed).

These all presented problems for the people who owned them, because we’re talking here about Windows XP predominantly which, while as comfortable as an old shoe for many people, wasn’t anywhere near as robust as the Windows versions we use today.

It was completely understandable then why people shifted away from desktop PCs and laptops to the iPad, Android tablets, large screen smartphones, and eventually on to Google Chromebook laptops.  The move away from Windows in the home was both inevitable and sensible.

These devices suited the way people wanted to use computers and the internet at home as well.  They’re devices used for content consumption, such as watching streaming video or endlessly scrolling through social media.  Even routine tasks such as banking, which was made significantly more secure by the introduction of dedicated banking apps, and online shopping were simple and straightforward on a tablet.

Remote Work and the Rise of the Chromebook

Fast forward a few years and these people are all stuck at home for the best part of two years, screaming children by their side not getting any mental or physical stimulation from their peers, and employers still expecting the job to be done.

Sales of laptops soared in 2020 and sales of external monitors doubled.  Beds were jettisoned from spare rooms and chairs moved out of conservatories as desks were installed and, much to everybody’s surprise productivity increased.  Employees were more productive as they no longer had to contend with the arduous drive or train ride into and home from work every day.  People were happier, more flexible when it came to the hours they worked and the clothes they wore, with many jokes being made about this over Zoom calls.

This of course has led to many arguments between employees and employers, with even the biggest companies such as Apple being issued lawsuits by annoyed employees who were being instructed to return to the office.  Eventually a happy medium was found with many companies now allowing people to work from home, or to work remotely a couple of days a week.

The Blurring Lines Between Devices

So how does this all affect IT Support and Windows Troubleshooting I hear you ask.  The answer to this is quite simple and goes back to what I mentioned earlier about iPads.  I said that laptop sales surged in 2020 but were all of these running Windows?  The answer to that is a resolute no.  Many were Chromebooks, and as we rolled into 2022 and 2023 some began appearing in households that were iPad Pros with a full keyboard and trackpad.

The reason for this is that the world of work had moved almost entirely online, with people signing into company software and services hosted on Microsoft Azure or Google Workspace.  These platforms are completely device agnostic and, while many people will run their workplace software, such as Teams and Office locally on their computer, there’s no longer any need to do so.

So what happened during the years between 2020 and 2024 is that the lines between a “computer” and a “computing device” became blurred.  IT Support departments would receive calls from people having trouble with their “PC” only to discover there was no PC at all, instead the end user was talking about a Chromebook signed into Azure and running company software from the cloud.

New IT Support Challenges in the Work-From-Home Era

But a problem with a computer is still a problem with a computer, especially when it comes to company file and internet access.  The upshot of this is that while support personnel used to only have to diagnose and troubleshoot problems with the company network infrastructure, all of a sudden they were called upon to diagnose and solve problems people were having with their home router and internet connection.

To compound this problem security became much more difficult to maintain as these computers were shared with other members of the family.  Security can still be managed from the cloud, with policies such as refusing access to computers that do not have up to date malware protection installed, but the challenges of a work computer also being used by the children for their homework, or for playing Call of Duty on the weekends are very real.

Managing Remote Teams and Global Support

So the answer is to just call everybody back into the office and have them use company computers you say.  Well actually that’s difficult now too, not just because of the push-back I mentioned earlier from employees, but also because of where those employees are.  One effect of the pandemic was that employers suddenly discovered they no longer had to choose from the small pool of expertise available in their local or regional area.  All of a sudden they could hire the best and brightest talent anywhere in the country, or indeed even anywhere in the world.

It's been common for companies since 2020 to have whole departments that have never met face to face, or that only meet once or twice a year as while the office is in Seattle, the department manager is in New Jersey, with other team members located in Dallas, the southern tip of Florida, and someplace in remote Kentucky nobody’s ever heard of.

It's the same, or possibly even worse in Europe as an office might be in London, but the staff might be scattered across Paris (France), Frankfurt (Germany), Copenhagen (Denmark) and half a dozen other countries.

Adapting IT Support for a New Reality

So how can you deal with this new reality as very clearly it’s not going away.  This new reality does indeed make the role of IT Support and Windows troubleshooting much more complex and a much larger role than it ever used to be, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be rewarding.  Policies and practices have to adapt.  You will have processes in place for first line support that determine what hardware and software is causing the problem, it’s not too difficult to inject some additional options into those processes.

Asking the right questions of the people you’re supporting is essential.  At the beginning of this article I mentioned that people will commonly refer to everything from an iPad Pro to a Chromebook, or even a laptop running Linux as a “PC” because that’s become the ubiquitous term for a computer on which work gets done.

There are ways to determine what people are really using through with simple questioning.  On almost all computers there are similarities.  Go into many Settings apps and look for System and you’ll likely see an About option, which will quickly tell the end user, and you what you’re dealing with.

So adapting your processes to include all the different possibilities of hardware, software, and cloud services you’re likely to encounter will very quickly bring your support processes back to speed and keep them there.  It won’t be too long after doing this that the new way of working becomes muscle memory, and something you won’t really think about again.

The world of work has changed and we all need to change with it.   Legendary naturalist Charles Darwin said “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” Or words to that effect, nobody really knows.

Looking Ahead: Future Workplace Challenges

If you think things are complicated now then just think a few years into the future as the technology we use in our homes and workplaces is still changing.  Windows PCs running on ARM Processors, which for years we’ve only seen in our smartphones, are now becoming commonplace, and businesses are making ever more use of Large Language Models (I refuse to call it A.I. because it’s just not… yet!) to help people transcribe meeting notes, write emails, and sift through huge volumes of data to look for patterns.  Some new computers, including Copilot+ Windows PCs, Apple computers running their M-series processors, and home PCs with powerful Nvidia or AMD graphics cards are equipped to make use of this, but the vast majority of computers already in use will struggle, and rely on cloud support to make this stuff work, something end-users will very likely not understand.

If this all sounds like a mountain that needs to be climbed it’s actually not, or at least it doesn’t have to be.  Some of your processes will need to change if they haven’t already, and some of the questions your first line support personnel ask will need to change, but once these changes are in-place they can be easily modified to accommodate future changes that we haven’t predicted yet.

If you want more information on this you can find it in my new Windows 11 Troubleshooting path at Pluralsight, https://www.pluralsight.com/paths/windows-11-troubleshooting and also my Windows 10 Troubleshooting path https://www.pluralsight.com/paths/windows-10-troubleshooting.