No Room in the Digital Camera

Lilly's son, a software engineer in medical imaging, had helped her buy and install a Toshiba notebook, a photo-quality HP printer, and an HP camera. She phoned to tell me that she was able to print many pictures she had taken, but that she had "filled the camera's memory", and was no longer able to copy pictures from the camera to the PC (as her son had shown her how to do). But her major computer problem was her inability save changes she made to her almost-finished memoirs word processor document. She needn't help; but her son now lived far away. When I arrived, I found Lilly as charming in person as she was in our telephone conversation, as she insisted on serving me an espresso coffee before we began to work on her problems.

It didn't take long for me to discover Lilly's problem saving her memoirs updates: She'd been editing, and trying to save, an "auto-compressed" document (which Windows won't allow you to save directly). I helped her learn how to edit and save an uncompressed version of that document, and I showed how her to drag the document to a diskette to make a backup copy.

I turned to the problem of not being able to copy pictures from her digital camera to her PC. So I could quickly diagnose the problem (and not confuse her with my rapid-fire clicking and mousing), I had Lilly leave my client's usual "driver's seat" position, and I asked her to wait while I did some standard fault isolation opne my own (stop/restart, unplug/plug, power off/on, switch ports & cables, ...). I realized that what Lilly was doing should have in fact worked, concluding that the failure was caused either by a faulty USB port on the camera, or a bad cable. I explained those probable causses to Lilly, and I advised her to take the camera and cable to the store where she had bought it. She did that, and I later learned that my diagnosis was correct (the cable was bad); after its replacement Lilly could again copy pictures to her PC.

During my visit I had told Lilly that my (reasonable) consulting fee included free telephone help. A few weeks later she phoned to tell me that she had finished writing her memoirs, and that she was no longer able to copy that document from her hard disk to a backup diskette. She had lost my instructions, and had reverted to older instructions from her son (that differed a little from the ones I had given her). When she read me his instructions, I noticed that they were missing one important step: pointing the cursor to the file to be copied before right-clicking and choosing "Send To".

I explained to her that right-clicking on the diskette instead of the memoirs document would lead to a dead end (asking Windows that the diskette be "Sent To" itself). I told her how to add the missing step, and then led her through her son's (modified) instructions. While we were talking about backup, I took a few minutes to help her learn how to shift the diskette's "read-write" tab so that her backup document would not be accidentally overridden or deleted. I left her confident that she knew how to back up her treasured memoirs to a safe place.