On the British television show, The IT Crowd, the first question the IT guys ask when someone calls is, "Have you tried turning it off and on?" If that doesn't work, they ask, "Is it plugged in?" So far, they haven't gotten past those two questions.

There are lots of good tips in Mark Minasi's 'How to Troubleshoot Any Network Problem.' And two of them are:

Check: Is it Plugged in?

Check it twice...

Okay, seriously, again I mean no disrespect to users or anyone else. It's just so easy to overlook the things that we can easily take for granted. I mean, when someone falls to the floor, do you immediately whip out your oxygen sensing probe and check that there's a detectable amount of oxygen in the room? I know -- the fact that you didn't also fall down kind of negates the need. But you know what I mean; we take the mundane for granted. And we take the reliable for granted; in billions of connections around the world transmitting gazillions of bits, things are plugged in 99.9999-plus percent of the time.

This is where checklists can be of help for two reasons: first, to remind you to check even the unusual stuff, and, second, as an excuse for asking someone else what sounds like an insulting question. Asking someone if everything's plugged in can make someone who's already upset more upset and angry.....

And

Reboot!

I have made this comment with tongue-in-cheek for years, but it does bear some truth: "the two most effective tools in the Microsoft world are 'reboot' and 'reinstall.'" (I should mention, however, that XP's System Restore has drastically reduced the number of reinstalls that I've had to do to that product, and I can't wait to see System Restore come to Server in Longhorn.)

I remind you about rebooting because where once we just knew that anything more minor than changing the background color required a reboot, modern Windows can do an awful lot of things without needing a reboot. Consider that you can take a vanilla copy of Server and add DHCP, WINS, DNS, IIS, and the majority of patches delivered for XP and 2003 in the past year... all without a reboot.

...

Hardware often needs "rebooting" after being reconfigured. Routers, modems and the like won't always show the effects of reconfiguration until you actually power them off and on....