One of the problems with being an accidental sysadmin – or really any kind of sysadmin – is that other people make inaccurate assumptions about what you can do and what you know. “You work for a computer company, don’t you? I can’t get to my files and there’s this popup asking me for something called BitCoin…. Can you just get rid of the popups for me?” (Sure. Along with your entire operating system, which I am going to have to delete and then reinstall. I hope you’re up to date on your backups. Please tell me you have backups. Oh, you thought I could just make the ransomware magically go away?*) Sometimes the weird demands come simply because the person doing the asking doesn’t know what is possible in the ever-changing world of IT. But sometimes the requested help is theoretically possible. Maybe.  You think. It’s then a case of hitting the internet to see if a) other people have the problem b) it really is fixable and c) someone can explain how to fix it in enough detail that you aren’t mucking blindly about editing the Windows Registry, for example. (Don’t do that, at least not blindly.) You could just head straight to the search engine and give your Google-fu a workout. But this column is supposed to be about saving you time, so behold: sites where you can ask your troubleshooting question and have a decent chance of it being answered usefully. Stack Exchange “That’s the big one,” according to my highly unscientific survey of exactly one other sysadmin. But he does have decades of experience, and he has a good point. Stack Exchange is enormous. And more valuably, it is organized and focused.  Stack Exchange is actually a collection of...