Solving computer problems is a lot of fun and a big challenge

I tell people that I love doing my job because I like solving problems. After 20 years of working in Information Technology I have been able to learn a lot of things about how computers work. One of the nice things about Information Technology is that every day is a different day. There are always new problems to solve and new things to learn.

In the last two weeks I worked with one of the network admins in our network operation center to upgrade all of our servers and workstations to the latest version of Anti Virus and Anti Spyware software. Most of the updates happened automagically via the updates being pushed to our workstations at night. I had to update all 7 of our servers manually and I had to touch almost half of the workstations when it was all said and done due to one type of failure or another.

I spend a lot of time making sure that all of our computers and servers are free of virus or ad ware , malware infections. I always tell people that I hate supporting windows. Then again I have a job because Microsoft Windows is such a huge target for all of the script kiddies and those that have nothing better to do than wreak havoc with the Windows Operation System.

One of the draw backs to inheriting a position as an I.T. Manager is that I inherit the mess that the last I.T. Person left on their way out. In my particular situation I had to start this position with no training on the existing systems and there was little to no documentation to refer back to. Not only that but the main file server that runs our vacation rental management software blew up 4 weeks before I got there and a new server was put in place.

I have been in discovery zone for the last 9+ months and thanks to a lot of hard work I have been able to get a good grasp on our LAN and how it is put together. Slowly and methodically I have been able to gather the information that was there and I am working on documenting the network. I have also realized that over the years there have been several people before me who had their own unique interpretations of computer support and how it should be done.



When you support 66 people in three geographical locations you find yourself very being very busy. You also find that your predecessors in an effort to handle the computer problems onslaught fell into the bad habit of just applying band-aids everywhere they could vs troubleshooting the root problem and solving it.

Two weeks later I have spent some time looking at our workstations and troubleshooting the reasons why the AV/AS upgrades are not working properly. I have noticed the multiple profiles and how most of those profiles have been infested with all sorts of ad-ware, spy-ware, malware etc. The problem with these types of infections is that they are usually very time consuming to mitigate. Once your computer gets fully infested with this garbage it is sometimes faster to just pop in the system restore disk and wipe the hard disk clean and do factory restore.

If you are a home user you need to keep your OS and application restore CD that you get from your hardware manufacturer. Some manufacturers are not giving out media but putting everything on a utility partition. That means you have two choices of restoring your computer. One is by rebooting your system to a system restore disk OR by booting the computer and then hitting F10 or F12 to get to the utility partition. The utility partition also can contain any hardware diagnostics software specifically for that brand of computer.

In a corporate environment you typically find yourself using the same model of computer. Mostly in our shop we use Dell computers. We have five or six different models of Dell so it presents a unique challenge with regards to how fast I can restore a computer should it experience a catastrophic failure. Hard drives , ram, monitors, peripherals are all easy to replace however when a motherboard goes south you are forced to replace the machine and start over.

The fastest and most efficient way of restoring a computer is to use an application such as Symantec Ghost. In a perfect world I would have a ghost image of every model of Dell in our shop. The only problem with that is I am merely one mortal doing the job of two people and I have not had the time to get all of the images necessary. I have been able to use Ghost Enterprise edition on one of my servers to make an image back up of several critical upper management computers. Should one of those die a horrible death I can restore either the entire hard disk or just the data depending on whether we replace the dead hardware with brand new hardware or an older box that is the same model.

In an effort to reduce the amount of computer problems we lock down the workstation and we do not give administrator rights to just anyone. In years past the Internet was not something that everyone in the enterprise could access. Only selected management or users that had to have access as part of their job description were given access to the Internet. Fast forward to 2009 and having Internet access is fully expected and realized. Employers want people to leverage the power of the Internet as a research and search tool to do their jobs. The downside of this access is that people are tempted to download freeware that is chuck full of adware and viruses and install it to their workstations and thereby causing a support call to the help desk.

Do you remember the days of using Netscape Navigator and the old fashioned HTML code to create websites? I even remember when inserting tables into a website was considered as advanced. Those were the same days when the only time you had to worry about catching a computer virus was when someone would introduce removable media to your computer. Now all you have to do is visit a bad website and your computer automatically downloads nasty little applications to your hard drive which are capable of scanning for network drives , infecting the enterprise and stealing corporate data and sending the data to a remote zombie machine somewhere on the Internet.

Due to the complexities of many websites today your typical web browser has to have plugin applications that provide support for different types of media. One of those plugin applications is Adobe Flash Player. Several of my users requested to have Adobe Flash installed so they can view web pages that require it. Adobe Flash player is up to version 10 and unfortunately Adobe has seen fit to force workstation users to have administrative rights to their workstations in order to use the Flash Player plugin. One of the work arounds that I found was to install Adobe Flash Player as the administrator. I was then able to rename the users profile to profilename.old and then have the user log on and create a new profile. In several situations this has worked and allowed Adobe Flash Player to work. One of the computers I am working on is so hosed up now that I need to just rebuild it. Once I put a fresh OS load on that one it should work just fine.