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rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Strong Sauce posted:

I guess its too much to ask them to use a flashdrive? I mean if they don't take it home then when do they use it... :gay:

In case the dates and the descriptions of P166's with 32MB RAM didn't clue you in, this was in the early 90's.

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rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Arsten posted:

Ticket Opener: uhenae
Ticket Description: user hard to understand/he seems to be talking about his de computer not properly syncing records
Ticket Status: closed
Ticket Remarks: u00741-user led me to bathroom/said in broken english that computer is not syncing/the toilet isnt flushing/informed user to call ext 089 next time/will tell janitorial this time/closed ticket
Ticket Bill: d00010

What the gently caress is going on here?

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

haljordan posted:

When I got my first job in an office, I couldn't believe all the passive-aggressive sniping over the freaking' temperature controls. There'd be two people, sitting side by side, five feet away from each other, and one would be roasting like a pig and the other would be shivering like it was the North Pole. Still baffles me to this day.

Do you work in my office?

It got so bad that maintainance came and screwed perspex boxes over the aircon control points so that people would stop loving with them, as we have 4 control points in the office I'm in and people were setting them to completely different temperatures. This meant the aircon units were fighting each other, wasting a shitton of power and ensuring that no-one was happy. It was a nice scheme, except that they forgot the thermostats were in the control points so the units in their fancy boxes could no longer sense the temperature properly.

The boxes have now been taken off again, the aircon is set to 20C, and we've all been told that we need to raise a ticket (see - relevant!) with Systems if we ever want to change it and they'll all be changed at the same time. Now I'm fine with 20C and I'm fine with changing them all at the same time. Other people are not. Oh dear god, the bitching - the constant, passive-aggressive bitching.


Seriously people: wear a jumper. It's a hell of a lot easier to make yourself warmer if you're too cold than it is for the rest of us to make ourselves cooler if you got your way and had the aircon on 28C. This is not the Bahamas, and it really shouldn't be that hard to wrap your head around the idea of extra layers.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Lum posted:

Kiddy porn and missing finance data

I had this at a previous job, minus the kiddy porn.

Everyone had their own private network share and we also had shared access shares available on request, but the HR director (don't get me started about HR in general) decided to store all her important poo poo on her desktop. Which was on a laptop. Which got stolen when we had a break-in.

Mass panic commences because she's lost pretty much everything she ever did since she started at the company, and "we should have been backing it up" - of course we weren't, because we only back up the network share. She was told this on day 1, around the same time we handed over her one-time password.

Luckily her assistant pipes up that she can still access the files. Given that the laptop wasn't there I found this quite impressive... until I figured out that as some point, someone had shared the goddamn desktop folder on the HR directors laptop and set up offline folders for it on her assistant's laptop. We also discovered the whole HR department had been doing this, so the share was available to anyone in the whole company.

After they all got a good chewing out by the CEO (this was quite a small company) we suddenly got a flood of tickets for new network shares as everyone scrambled to get their data somewhere where it would actually get backed up. And clearly no-one had thought that it might be a good idea to comply with data protection and privacy laws.


Luckily the laptop was later found in a ditch on the company grounds (who knows?) so some rather sensitive data was not lost.

rolleyes fucked around with this message at 11:18 on Dec 24, 2008

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Cizzo posted:

This.

Just have them unplug the cable modem and plug it back in like the man says.

Yep. Ours will happily connect to any number of machines so long as you power-cycle it first. The only way the cable company restricts it is using the MAC of the modem itself, so that they can deactivate the connection (i.e. take that MAC off the whitelist) if you don't pay the bill or if your line hasn't been activated yet.

All cable lines are active all the time on this network so that's the only way to prevent people getting free internet.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

ab0z posted:

loving dammit I hate it when people do that. I had one guy get pissed off that we couldn't retrieve the several hundred contacts that he accessed via autocomplete but NEVER ADDED TO HIS ACTUAL ADDRESS BOOK.

To be fair, it's completely retarded that outlook does this because it's just asking for this exact thing to happen. If you're going to store previous addresses then for gently caress's sake why not add them to the user's address book as just an email address and leave the rest blank.

If they're then smart enough to realise where the address book is they just need to add the missing info.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Jerk McJerkface posted:

:psyduck:

I'd say "hooray for certifications" but even then, surely he must have actually SEEN some networking hardware at some point... right?

:(

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Casao posted:

To encourage people to lock their computers, we tend to get in and put MS paint pictures as their background. Or flip their monitor. I think next one will end up with the screenshot of desktop for background with no icons.

Ours autolock after 5 minutes. :(

Once again - the joys of the pharmaceutical industry.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?
Slight derail, but people talking about pranks with unlocked workstations have reminded me of a great one to pull:

I'll leave it to your imagination to think up things to do with this knowledge, but many people don't realise that Outlook email filter rules have the ability to trigger a program. Any program. One of the managers has been known to write batch scripts which do various annoying-but-non-destructive things and set up a rule that triggers it when an email comes in from him with a specific phrase. Oh and that rule will also delete the email that triggered it.

You can have almost unlimted fun with this if you're subtle about what you do, and thanks to him if I ever forget to lock my workstation my first action when I get back is to check my outlook rules.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

afflictionwisp posted:

I've found this to be a really hard question for some users to answer

What's worrying is that so many of these people are in positions where you'd expect a reasonable level of education. If you're the HR director's PA and you can't manage to pull together a brief description of the problem you're having then what the gently caress.

I mean, let's look at it differently. I know nothing about trains, but if you put me in a train cab and there was such a thing as a train-driver's "helpdesk" number then I could describe what I was looking at well enough to be told how to open the doors on the rest of the train.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

gwon posted:

The only thing I have changed in this is usernames and company names, best ticket I've seen in ages.

Why can't more people be like this!

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Accipiter posted:

Uh... If you can't figure this one out, maybe you shouldn't be handling those types of tickets.

So what, he's just meant to guess which one to change?

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

ShizCakes posted:

If he only has one domain, that domain likely has only 1 MX record (unless they have failover).

Given that it's posted in here there has to be more to it than that. Like, as you say, the guy has more than one MX or more than one domain, or hasn't specified what the modification he wants actually is.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Sir Nigel posted:

Computers in idle draw little power. Even high end gaming systems (C2Q/C2D with GTX 260/4870s and 4GB of Ram and 5 hard drives) draw a surprisingly little amount of power at idle. The power consumption goes down even further if you let them turn off the hard drives and monitor after 10 minutes.

Bullshit.

Tell you what, let's play guess the number. I've measured this system I'm on now at the socket. I'll tell you the specs, you can take a guess, and the answer is at the bottom. It's hardly top of the range:

- Athlon64 X2 4400+ (socket 939)
- Geforce 8800GT
- 2GB PC3200
- 3 7200RPM harddrives
- DVD-RW
- Everything else (sound, lan, USB) is on the motherboard, which is an Asus A8R-MVP

Connected extras:
- Wired USB keyboard
- Wired USB mouse
- Wired Xbox 360 controller




...nice big gap...






Power measured at the socket at idle, with all power saving stuff switched on: 130 watts


Now granted, most workstations aren't carrying an 8800GT but every single one in my office is a dual core (proper dual core, not HT) machine. So if you're very generous and remove 50 watts for an idle graphics card that gives you 80 watts. The average office LCD is 20-30 and users NEVER switch them off, so that's somewhere around 100 watts, 85 when the monitor eventually goes into standby.

That's 4kWh per workstation per weekend, just to allow the virus scanner to run.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Kaso posted:

Given you've got the capability to measure, how low will your pc go with all the idle power saving features turned on and activated, hard drives stopped, graphics output stopped etc.

All the power saving (processor scaling etc) is already switched on.

The primary harddrive is never going to turn off regardless of the setting because Vista loves to keep chugging away. I can't get the others to stop on demand either (indexing or stuff I guess) but harddrives are ~6 watts idle (not stopped) so take 12 off. When I set display suspend to 1 minute and wait for it then power drops to ~115 watts so I guess you can blame Aero for that.

That would give you ~105 watts if you could ever get the harddrives to stop.


For reference, running the Crysis demo at a glorious 640x480 slideshow pushed it up to about 170-180.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Lum posted:

UK government work

Oh god, local government and their IT policies. I don't know if it's like this in the states, but over here every department within a county council acts as a seperate entity and charges any other department for it's services. Including the IT department. And the helpdesk. Yeah.

Just to spell the monumental stupidity out out, that means that a user logging a ticket costs that user's department money. This means that nothing ever gets logged until it's gone from being annoying, to disruptive, to dangerous through to critical and beyond. Worm infections don't get logged until the entire department is brought down (and as Lum made clear given the state of the users this will happen), people will systematically run every single printer out of paper before logging a request for more so that they can get them all done with one ticket, etc etc. What a clusterfuck.


I happen to have a friend who works there. He does lots of statistical stuff and churns out reports on whatever another department is paying him to churn out reports on. Most of these are done using Crystal Reports. Which regularly requires upgrading. Which can't be upgraded without uninstalling the old version and then installing the new version. Quite apart from the :psyduck: factor of modern software not having the ability to update itself, this obviously requires local admin rights which he obviously does not have. This process has to be done by the helpdesk, which costs the department several hundred pounds every time it needs doing.

Not related to IT, but he also recently had to reapply for his own job since he was becomming full time rather than contact. Fair enough, right? No. There were no other candidates and his current boss was not only on the interview panel but pretended he didn't know him throughout the interview.


Ladies and gentlmen, this is your council tax at work.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Superhaus posted:

She wrote a program that created 1.3 million files in her home directory and she is wondering why ls is taking so long.

There must be some background to this. Why would you do that and then not make the connection?

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Topsy Kretts posted:

"NO, I WON'T MOVE, JUST TELL ME WHAT TO DO"

I know it's not realistic but in this situation I really wish I could just say "ok, explain to me how do your job" and then bitch-slap them whenever they try to show by example.

See? Not as easy as you think, o great and wonderful mouse-defending users.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

nullandvoid posted:

I don't know if Word does, but Notepad does. Use it all the time for my voicemails.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/260563

Holy poo poo. I actually had to go and test this before I fully believed it too. Where is this even documented?

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Heh, well yes. You have to admit, an obscure MSKB article is not the first place people would think to look for a list of Notepad features though.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Starbucks posted:

She was probably just making sure it went alright and wanted someone to talk to :shobon:

More likely trying to make herself feel important because she's not just a secretary, she's the president's secretary.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Jelmylicious posted:

Obviously he both diagnosed and analysed. When you do both, you don't have time left over to type them both out, so you have to cut corners somewhere...

It's like we're back in the 80s.
"William? William?! Actually I'll call you Bill, it's quicker. Bill, we need a dialysis on our guy's SHS account ASAP, I want it on my desk COB OK? Time is money!"

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Various people posted:

facebook

My company blocks a whole range of things including social networking, software downloads, etc using websense. I have no problem with this despite being on the receiving end of it, as I know I'm at work to... you know... work? On the rare occasions I've actually needed to get hold of a piece of freeware I've just submitted a helpdesk ticket saying what I want and why, and it usually arrives by email a short while later.

Incidentally, we've used websense for ages but facebook was only finally blocked sometime last year. Before that I could walk down my office of around 100 people and a good 20% of the monitors I looked at would have facebook up. People used to sit there and play chess over it all day, but now that's gone they don't seem to have found anything to replace it that I've seen so I would say the policy was a success from a return on investment perspective.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

ab0z posted:

...Which brings us back to documentation. So that when they don't read the documentation you left for them, you can tell them to do so and/or get hosed.

I think you missed the best option:

Offer to come out if they pay you consultancy rates. Oh and it'll be time and a half as you're having to come in outside of office hours dues to, you know, having another job now.

No? That's when you tell them to get hosed.

:)

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Casao posted:

Edit: I do remember my favorite ticket from the weekend. Someone asked me to provide proof we DIDN'T resend an invoice. That took me 4 or 5 rewrites to adequately explain why it isn't possible to definitively prove we didn't do so. Still waiting for an answer to that one.

It's perfectly simple. Clearly the invoice program is like the Dharma Initiative computer from Lost and only destroys the world sends the invoice when you stop entering the numbers so you can just print out the log to show you entered the numbers every 15 minutes like a good worker and send it to them.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Libal posted:

Awesomeness

That's great. I'm sure there'll be someone reading this thread who'll get pissy just thinking about the 'waste of company time and resources' or whatever but it's nice to see there are still some large companies (and senior managers) that know how to have a laugh now and again.

How did HR take it?

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Golbez posted:

I don't understand this. I created my gmail account in 2004. Since then it has been my sole personal account, as well as my work account. Its current size: A hair over 1 gig. Now, sure, I tend to download then delete any emails with huge attachments, but ... I don't get it, what kind of email traffic is going on here?

Fw: fw: fw: fw: fw: fw: re: funny cats!

Containing a ppt of uncompressed lolcat bitmaps.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Starbucks posted:

Sort of in this spirit of the thread but on the other side....

:phone: Can we shut down ticket ref xxx please?
:phoneb: Did you fix it?
:phone: Let me see.......no..
:phoneb: That is a no then
:phone: :(
:phoneb: :confused: any info you need just email me, bye

Gah! I had this the other day. I raised a ticket with our systems guys and went home. Came back the next day to an email from the ticket system stating "Ticked #12345 has been closed. Called user, user confirmed it's no longer an issue". Erm?


Then I phoned the systems desk:

:phone: Systems!
:confused: Hi. Can you tell me why ticket #12345 has been closed?
:phone: According to the notes you said we could close it.
:confused: Well, I raised it on my way out of the door last night and it was closed before I got in today so... no, no I didn't.
:phone: Ok... hand on a minute!
:phone:
:phone: ...ok, <notoriously lazy systems dude> closed it because his queue was getting backed up.
:confused: Oh great! Can you re-open it please?
:phone: Yep, and I'll go one better - I'm assigning it to his manager with a note to say what happened.
:confused: Awesome.


gently caress you, notoriously lazy systems dude. At least your coworkers hate you too.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Lum posted:

I hate you. :argh:

Heh. To be fair it wasn't an urgent issue (I said as much in the ticket) and I also explained that I was leaving shortly and it could wait until tomorrow. The systems helpdesk is also well known for its long turnaround times; not long as in "it's been 15 minutes, why isn't my printer fixed?" long, long as in "I requested this (free, no license required) software two weeks ago - what gives?" long.

Believe me, I've done my helpdesk time and I promised myself I would never let myself write one of the "WHY ISN'T THIS WORKING I WANT IT WORKING WHEN I GET IN TOMORROW gently caress YOU I'M OUT OF HERE!" tickets which I used to hate dealing with.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Midelne posted:

...claimed there was a jam in the left door, then the front door, left door, right door, and front door again.

We have a few large HPs that we rent, and the one nearest me will cheerfully send you round every possible jam location (all the while claiming that the jam is in that actual location) until you finally hit paydirt and spot the paper.

I'm usually the one who ends up sorting it out because everyone else gets put off by the large "WARNING: These components are hot!" label on the door which accesses the paper feed and toners, which always seems to be the first place it tells you to look.

So... I don't know whether this is par for the course with large HP multifunc printers, or if ours is screwed as well.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?
And that's why, back in 2004 when I was last involved with the infrastructure side of things for a living, I persuaded my boss at the time that we should run proper trunking during the major office extension/reorganisation.

Yes it cost money, and yes I spent many a tedious hour attaching cables to outlet mounts, but I'm willing to bet they haven't had to rip any of it out yet just to move a desk - all thanks to the wonders of patch cables.


Of course, compared to what you guys are dealing with, it sounds like that particular job was a nirvana of technology.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Baggins posted:

"ProwlerEdje"

Servers for stalkers? Now that's a niche market...

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?
Even TDWTF is posting ticket logs now... was that one of you guys?!

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Raluek posted:

Maybe I'm just misremembering stuff from when I was in high school, but I remember there being cards with 128 and 256-bit-wide buses, where a 128MB 256-bit card was more desirable than the other way around. I haven't heard that spec being thrown around since the 8800GTS came out (did it have a 320bit interface or some poo poo? I'm even more unsure about this).

You're on the right track. The width of the memory bus determines how much data you can move across it in one clock cycle, so the wider it is the faster it is at any given speed. This was important 'back in the day' as the workload was more or less 50/50 for 3d maths vs. texture processing and the faster you can move data around the faster you can process textures.

It's not so much of a deciding factor with modern graphics cards as the workload at the moment is slanted much more towards the 3d maths, as texture processing has reached the point where there aren't really any more improvements to be made. The main concern becomes the actual processing power on the card for pushing polygons around and modifying them with shaders etc. And, these days, running the physics too.

Bus width only really comes into play if you want to run 1900x1600 at 16xAA and 16xAF, as all three of those things require large amounts of memory traffic.

rolleyes fucked around with this message at 09:09 on Aug 15, 2009

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?
Fellow thread followers, this is one of the days you will remember for the rest of your lives; the day Midelne finally snapped.

This is as good a way as any to do it really - at least you're introducing him to the idea that actions have consequences and, while he'll no doubt accuse you of throwing him under a bus, all you've done is take instructions from your 'superior' and informed the affected personnel.

In other words, in the world of office politics, you're reasonably well covered. Good work, and good luck next week!

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?
Commiserations, evobatman. Another victim of the "our users are special snowflakes!" mentality.

On that subject, Midelne: is there any news on the big corporate showdown? I'm really hoping you can convince them just how bad Rod is. It doesn't seem like justice if you end up leaving.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Veritron posted:

It took me an incredibly long time before I figured out why the windows key was anything more than an annoying way of accidentally alt-tabbing out of games... (in vista, you can invoke any program in your quicklaunch using windowskey 1,2 etc, windows-key r opens run menu, windows key opens start menu, windows key-d shows the desktop...)

Most of that has been around since Win2k at least, and also makes me worry slightly that you might not know about start menu search. Please tell me you know about start menu search... :ohdear:

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?

Sir Nigel posted:

The joy of Windows 7 is search and run are combined in this really sexy way. :woop:

It's the same as it is in Vista. I guess I expected more people in SHSC to have used Vista than actually have.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?
To be fair I think most people (myself included) who disliked the XP visual style did so because:
- It took up a large amount of unnecessary space compared to win2k/classic/whatever.
- It looked like a my first computer.

Both of these things were fixed with Aero.

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rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?
Oh, if we're talking about start menus then yes I did (and still do, at work) use the 'new' start menu in XP, but with the classic visual style. Yes it looks ugly, but like you say it's more useful.

coyo7e posted:

:words:
Now this I don't get. Aero doesn't waste space like Luna did, and if you disable it you also lose all the benefits of compositing so go back to spiking your processor up to 100% whenever you drag a window. Also, on the laptop side of things, unless it's got a really terrible graphics card Aero can actually save you battery power.

rolleyes fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Sep 16, 2009