Camera as a Troubleshooting Tool

Have you come across those annoying situations when output on your computer screen scrolls on and on so fast that you cannot read it? It doesn’t matter too much if they were just merely informative messages that you can afford to not read. But what if your computer is crashing and that somewhere hidden in that scrolling text contains some important information that might help you figure out what might be wrong? That’s something that happens to me from time to time.

My “solution” to this problem is quite simple and effective. Take a photo of the screen. Your camera will very effective freeze in time whatever is shown on the screen. You can then take your time to review the details captured in the photo later. No more worries about trying to speed read the fast scrolling text.

You could also try taking a screen capture, but this is assuming your operating system has been booted up and running good enough for screen capture functions to be working. This is something I did on my Mac OS X recently to figure out what iPhoto was trying to complain about. Every time I started iPhoto, a window will pop up briefly and then disappear. It’s just too fast for me to read anything off the window. I didn’t really care too much because iPhoto started up just fine anyway. But I eventually decided I wanted to track down what that pop up window said. (Mac OS X users: If you didn’t know, Command-Shift-3 captures the whole screen, while Command-Shift-4 captures a selected screen area or selected window after pressing the spacebar to toggle the selection mode.)

If screen capture doesn’t work… the camera will certainly do wonders.