Change of Pace

So I just got back this week to work after being on vacation for a week. I was in Washington DC doing one of my other passions photography. It was a very nice change of pace from dealing with computer issues to be dealing with taking pics of 8th graders as we visited different places. Over the 6 days that we were in the DC and surrounding area I ended up taking over 700 pictures. 450 of those were for me and around 270 of them were for the trip video that will be put together by the tour company. But alas the fun of that trip has come to an end and I am now back to work fixing computer problems and such. It was a fairly uneventful week yet still busy. This coming week is finals week which means that the students will be leaving and the profs will be leaving for the summer very soon as well. That will allow us to get started on our summer projects. Our summer projects are going to be a lot of fun but a lot of work. Yay for the start of summer.

Users

It is amazing to me that despite school email addresses being the email used for communications our users still dont pay much attention to their account. You must change your password every 4 months. That isnt asking people too much but yet people still forget constantly despite there being a timer when they login to the private webpage showing when they set their password and when it will expire. If by chance they are on campus and within 14 days of their password expiring, when they login to a machine on campus it will alert them to that fact and ask them if they want to change it now. 99.9% of the users do not change their password until the absolute last day.

IT Professional is still alive

Wow I had totally forgotten about this blog. Maybe I should start posting again.

Computers

Sometimes you just have to love computers and then others you just have to hate them. So a few weeks ago one of our clients got a new computer from Circuit City and I had to go out and set up the printer for them. Here comes the sick part, this machine cost $500 bucks and is stinking amazing. It has a 64bit Athlon processor, it has built in video but has pci express if you want to change it, it comes standard with 512mb of DDR RAM, a 200Gb SATA HDD, a 9 in 1 media card reader, a dual layer DVD Burner and the list just goes on. This machine kicks the pants off my machine that I built myself which is to be expected since i built my machine several years ago but still. I am just amazed at the prices of computers and the specs of them nowadays. It is amazing what you can get for fairly cheap. I mean it is seriously making me consider getting a pre-built system when it comes time to upgrade my machine but we shall see when the time gets closer.

The joy of computing

So recently when I have been servicing client computers I have come upon machines that are living well beyond their usefullness. The worst part about these machines is that they people are fine with them because they "still work." Well when it takes you 4+ hours to do the maintenance on a machine because the machine has like 128MB of RAM and a super slow processor and is using 120MB of the RAM just sitting there doing nothing. So what does this mean folks, it means that when you start doing anything on the machine it starts using the HDD as RAM which equals very very slow performance especially when the HDD is only a 5400 RPM HDD. I mean technically my computer is living past its usefulness but I built the machine with good parts so it is still a decent machine even now. The other thing that is bugging me is that at one of the clients there is one of the workers that does not like the fact that we come in during normal business hours because she can't use her computer for like 30-45 min however she still finds other stuff to do but it always seems to be such an inconvenience to her.

Oh the joys of computers

So last night I was going to activate my copy of Windows XP and I ran into an issue. Something got broken in Windows. So what did I have to do? I had to completely reinstall EVERYTHING!!!! Oh the joys of computers. More later just a quick rant tonight.

I hate computers sometimes

So recently I have been trying to backup all of my stuff on my computer so that I can make the switch from Windows 2000 to Windows XP Professional. Well it seemed like every time I would go to burn something to back it up it would fail. It wouldnt fail right away but it would fail after burning for a while. I dont seem to have much luck when it comes to burners. Right now I have a Dual-Layer DVD+/-RW drive. I used to have just a regular old CD-RW in my computer but then for some reason it stopped working (might have gotten some dust in it when I popped the faceplate off and spray painted it black). That drive never did seem to work right for me from the time I got it so when it finally gave up the ghost it was just icing on the not working correctly for me cake. Up until now I hadnt really had any problems with the new burner but it sure is annoying and a waste of good DVD-R media when the stupid thing fails in writing a disk. I was finally able to trick the machine into burning my stuff for me. Why it didnt burn in the first place I do not know. So over this past weekend I made the switch to XP Pro. I havent had much time to play around with it just yet but it seems to be working fine. Sometimes I wonder why I chose to work with computer when they are such a frustrating little machine at times.