Yesterday at work, my coworkers failed to make a sale because an HP printer didn't have a reduce/enlarge function on copies. I found this bloody unbelievable, since my 6 year old HP can do that. When they left, I analyzed the panel of buttons and began pressing anything under 'Copy' (except 'Start Copy', I know what that does) and, rather unintuitively, hitting the Copy button twice allows you to customize the result. I was hailed as smart for acting like a 7 year old.
I am often times asked what technique I use when fixing a teacher's laptop, or making their projector work, or figuring out why the fax machine keeps printing "Desmond E. Charland" on all the headers.
The real secret is that often times I do not have any idea of what caused the problem, and many ideas of how to solve it. So I touch this, and touch that, and 9/10 times, it actually fixes the problem.
Of course, I do educated guesses. I won't screw with the mouse properties or the graphics card if the computer is not connecting to the internet. I may try another ethernet cable, renew the connection, or see if other computers on the network are encountering the same problem. If the projector is broken, I will try switching VGA ports, hitting the display output hotkey until something goes awry, or checking the NVidia/Display properties.
And you know what, I'm pretty certain your certified computer techie will do this too, and write it off as a diagnosis service fee. It's in their contract, y'know. For example, the first thing that any competent computer repair shop will do to fix a non-booting computer is open it up and shove the memory chips in and out to see if they're loose. Without even knowing the reason, they are already touching my hardware. Wow that just came out wrong.
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