Got an error message? Here's how to find out what it means.
After rockers74's post below, I figured that a little piece of advice might help everyone. Well, everyone who doesn't already know it, that is.

Something apparently not very well known at all is the ability to perform a phrase search in Google. It's bloody useful when finding out what error messages mean.

Here's how: put the words inside quotation marks. That's all. "the rolling stones", for example, will bring up different results than the rolling stones. The former will cause Google to consider every word, in the exact order you typed them. The latter, on the other hand, will bring up anything which matches the main search terms, regardless of how they appear in the referenced pages.

You don't need to type the entire error message; an excerpt from it will often serve, as long as it's unique enough. Only practice will help you determine the best excerpt to choose for a given error message.

This will help you determine if the error is due to something which has gone wrong with the computer, and thus needs some assistance from the unshaven, unwashed, social rejects you call an IT department, or if it's something you can easily rectify yourself.
( flake has nothing against your right leg, Sun 27 Sep 2009, 22:03, 5 replies)

Heh, they taught us that in Primary School
:P
( St. Defenestration The REAL one, Sun 27 Sep 2009, 22:10, closed)

Some of my co-workers didn't know it.
If only everyone was taught this stuff at an early age.
( flake has nothing against your right leg, Sun 27 Sep 2009, 22:13, closed)

awww bless you
I appear to have become a totem for the technologicaly inept. Hoorah! I've found my parish!
(rockers74 killed a man in Reno just to watch him die., Sun 27 Sep 2009, 22:30, closed)

You're welcome.
It occured to me that, instead of venting impotently about how useless my users are, I could actually do something helpful for them.
( flake has nothing against your right leg, Sun 27 Sep 2009, 22:45, closed)

lmgtfy
You could try sending them a link from lmgtfy.com/
(TwiddlyThumbs, Tue 29 Sep 2009, 14:59, closed)