Imagine this scenario: you're playing your favorite video game and you finally get to the big boss. You spent countless hours finding this boss neglecting all other responsibilities like your job, school, even hygiene. That's pretty gross but I get it. So, you're right about to kill the big boss when suddenly, your game console shuts off completely. You'll probably freak out for a second but then you remember, it's okay, you saved the game before the boss came along. So now, you can turn it back on and you'll be at the same spot but then your console shuts off again. This happens over and over. You like most people are devastated. You find to a fit of rage but then just before you toss your console out, you make one last ditch effort and yell, "Tell me, what's wrong with you?" Suddenly, you hear a faint voice telling you what you want to hear. Wouldn't that be amazing? Sure, that scenario was a bit exaggerated but my point is that our computers actually can talk to us and tell us what's wrong. Maybe they won't whisper answers to us, but they speak to us in the form of logs. Logs or files that record system events on our computer. Just like a systems diary our computer will record events like when it was turned on, when a driver was loaded and even when something isn't working in the form of error messages. In all operating systems, logs are kept so we can refer back to them when we need to find out something that happened. But logs can be hard to navigate because our computer will essentially record everything. Here's what a log looks like. As you can see, it can be tough to make your way through a log but with a little bit of elbow grease we can figure out what happened on our computer and piece together a solution. We'll see an example of how a log is useful in figuring out an issue in a later lesson. We'll dive into the technical details of logs in a later course. For now, just be aware that we can investigate details about our computer that aren't obvious to us. Unfortunately, our computers, cars, and machines don't have a little voice that tells us what's wrong when there's a problem. But by the end of this program, you'll be able to navigate and read logs, so you won't even need it.