ux-portfolio-KyleNoCompile

Journal Entry One: By Kyle Reeves, 3/6/2021

My user eXperience with fixing my parent’s broken laptop:

      Last Sunday morning, my Dad woke me up saying he needed some technical support with his laptop that suddenly stopped working. The computer reported that it had somehow lost its operating system, meaning it would no longer boot to the Windows login page. My parents were confused by this screen, saying that they hadn’t done anything that would have caused this, and were requesting my help. My current goal in this endeavor now was to get this laptop back to a working state.

      I started off by assessing the current state of the laptop, it presented a screen saying there was no operating system present and that it needed one to proceed (See figure 1). Thankfully, I’ve been in situations like this before and knew how to get a working version of Windows 10 on this laptop by using a USB boot drive. A USB boot drive is a simple USB thumb drive that has an operating system on it as well as a way for that operating system to be installed on whatever computer it is plugged into. I would classify this process as memorable because it is easily remembered due to its special nature. This as well is definitely a strength of the Windows operating systems.

      Now, with my USB boot drive in hand, I plugged it into the laptop, entered the BIOS screen of the laptop (which stands for Basic Input/Output System), and changed the boot order to select the USB drive first. The BIOS is the firmware used to perform hardware initialization during the booting process and to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs. This involves navigating to the “boot” tab in the BIOS and changing the order to put the USB boot drive first. Now when the laptop starts up, it will select this boot drive as the first option to boot. Once the bootup begins, the re-installation process becomes very error tolerant, meaning that it isn’t prone to errors, as it gives a step by step on what to do and what options are usually the best (See figure 2). After a few minutes and the reinstallation complete, the laptop regained its working status and my parents were thankful. I was even able to save all the original files on the computer as well!