The Practical Help Desk course takes someone with no IT experience to the point where they can do the real work of a Tier 1 help desk technician. It's also the foundation TCM recommends before its more advanced…
Lesson Note
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12 entries across collections.
Information Technology (IT) is the people, processes and technology an organisation uses to create, store, move and protect information. In practice, IT exists to keep the business working. The payroll team needs…
Lesson Note
A computer is built from billions of tiny switches (transistors). A switch has two reliable states: off and on, which we write as 0 and 1.
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Electrostatic discharge (ESD) is the sudden flow of static electricity between two objects at different charge levels. You feel a shock at around 3,000 volts, but chips can be damaged by a few hundred — far below…
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Limited — RAM and storage sometimes; CPU and GPU almost never (soldered)
Lesson Note
An operating system (OS) manages the hardware and gives programs a consistent, safe way to use it. Without an OS, every application would need its own code to drive the disk, network card and screen — and nothing…
Lesson Note
TCM Practical Help Desk section 1 — what the course covers, how lessons are formatted, lab requirements, and how to ask for help well.
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TCM Practical Help Desk section 2 — what IT does, the IT org chart and roles, help desk tiers and responsibilities, and reading job postings.
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TCM Practical Help Desk section 3 — binary, bits and bytes, character encoding, logic gates and how a CPU computes, compilers and abstraction.
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TCM Practical Help Desk section 4 — ESD, CPU, RAM, drives, PSU, GPU, motherboard, ports and peripherals, POST and the BIOS, plus commands to inspect hardware.
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TCM Practical Help Desk section 5 — opening laptops safely, batteries, SODIMM RAM, laptop drives, the CMOS battery and other internal parts.
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TCM Practical Help Desk section 6 — what an OS does, kernel vs userland, file systems and partition styles, and file types, with commands to check each.
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