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Wagonburner posted:
I see this every now and then, and it boggles the mind how it happens. And why it's always .lnk with Word, I don't know.
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Sep 10, 2013 17:37
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Shopping for laptops is pissing me off. I've been tasked with buying a kickass laptop for a C level. It's gotta look nice for presentations, have "a big screen for watching movies on" and also have a touchscreen, on a ~$1200-$1500ish budget. I'm really not sure why it has to have a touchscreen, and the touchscreen requirement is throwing a goddamn monkey wrench into this process. Having a touchscreen steers everything into the sleeker, lighter, more portable (read: smaller screen) type of laptop which isn't what I want here. Every time I try a different manufacturer's laptop customizer I find myself unable to really put together the mix of options that I want. Typically it's not being able to put a goddamn SSD in the thing. Some of them seem to have some type of traditional hard drive + SSD cache option. Now I've never tried a laptop with an SSD cache like that - does it boot up fast like it would on a SSD? That's really what I care about. I just want to be able to put together something awesome and be able to stand by it and really vouch for it, but the more I think about it the more I realize I've never actually worked with a laptop that I truly liked. Argh.
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Sep 10, 2013 17:39
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blackswordca posted:Reading the comments Ill have to look at how much it costs to take them to small claims for a worst case scenario. Its not a huge amount of money they owe me, so Ill have to see how much of that will be eaten up in fees and lost time. Looks like filing fees are $100 for claims up to $7500, and $200 for between $7500 and the max of $25000. This assumes my memory is correct and you live in Alberta.
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Sep 10, 2013 17:42
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J posted:Shopping for laptops is pissing me off. I've been tasked with buying a kickass laptop for a C level. It's gotta look nice for presentations, have "a big screen for watching movies on" and also have a touchscreen, on a ~$1200-$1500ish budget. I'm really not sure why it has to have a touchscreen, and the touchscreen requirement is throwing a goddamn monkey wrench into this process. Having a touchscreen steers everything into the sleeker, lighter, more portable (read: smaller screen) type of laptop which isn't what I want here. Every time I try a different manufacturer's laptop customizer I find myself unable to really put together the mix of options that I want. Typically it's not being able to put a goddamn SSD in the thing. Some of them seem to have some type of traditional hard drive + SSD cache option. Now I've never tried a laptop with an SSD cache like that - does it boot up fast like it would on a SSD? That's really what I care about. We have a few Dell Latitude E6430's with touchscreens (they used to be standard for some reason and we got them for free?? I'm not even sure) that were around $1100. Dunno if thats shiny enough for your C-level but I'm sure they sell them with SSDs or you could put one in yourself. For that price we get a 14" screen, middle of the road i5, 320gb HD.
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Sep 10, 2013 17:43
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J posted:Shopping for laptops is pissing me off. I've been tasked with buying a kickass laptop for a C level. It's gotta look nice for presentations, have "a big screen for watching movies on" and also have a touchscreen, on a ~$1200-$1500ish budget. I'm really not sure why it has to have a touchscreen, and the touchscreen requirement is throwing a goddamn monkey wrench into this process. Having a touchscreen steers everything into the sleeker, lighter, more portable (read: smaller screen) type of laptop which isn't what I want here. Every time I try a different manufacturer's laptop customizer I find myself unable to really put together the mix of options that I want. Typically it's not being able to put a goddamn SSD in the thing. Some of them seem to have some type of traditional hard drive + SSD cache option. Now I've never tried a laptop with an SSD cache like that - does it boot up fast like it would on a SSD? That's really what I care about. Could always get the guy a Surface Pro Edit: Missed one or two of the requirements.. looking like an HP Envy 17t-j000 may fit the bill with the downside of having to use an HP Envy. blackswordca fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Sep 10, 2013 |
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Sep 10, 2013 17:44
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blackswordca posted:I know. Its basically a small amateur racing league there are 15 drivers or so. I don't even know why they need a board. Amateur or semi pro sports are the worst. The powers that be always have delusions that they are running some big show. A story: Back in college I worked in screen printing shop. One day a guy came in who demanded to speak to the owner. The owner came out and they talked. The guy was the president of a local semi pro hockey team that was just started and was wanting to use is as his branded attire company. Great! But of course he wanted discounts now based on all the future business we would be getting, and logo design, etc. What followed was 2 weeks of hell where this guy micromanaged every decision, rejected multiple designs, and demanded a quick turn around. The day finally came where we had everything ready, just needed him to pick stuff up and give us money. He never showed. The owner was PISSED... until the manger of the shop next door came over with the newspaper. rear end in a top hat hockey guy is on the front page after a neighbor kid told his parents about the pictures that hockey guy was taking of him. They raided his house and found a lot of child porn, most of it taken by himself. So what I am saying blackswordca, is whenever this rear end in a top hat racing guy is yelling at you, just think to yourself "8 year olds dude."
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Sep 10, 2013 17:44
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blackswordca posted:I wont be doing anything until I get a cheque in my hand or some sort of reasonable arrangement is made. Seconding the "wait until the cheque clears". And it's not a "reasonable arrangement" until you have the money in your hand for previous work done-- don't let them set up some sort of partial payment plan, especially since-- blackswordca posted:Its not a huge amount of money they owe me Also, I don't know where you're at, but small claims filing tends to be like <$100.
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Sep 10, 2013 17:45
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blackswordca posted:Could always get the guy a Surface Pro Wait a minute, I don't think 10.6" qualifies as: "big screen for watching movies on". There are countless touchscreen ultrabooks at 13" or so which would be better than Surface Pro, but still not exactly in line with the required spec
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Sep 10, 2013 17:46
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:I see this every now and then, and it boggles the mind how it happens. And why it's always .lnk with Word, I don't know. .lnk with Irfanview for me. And of course she didn't know what irfanview is so she described it as "catsblast" (Referring to the logo). It's quite simple as to how to do it - Select a shortcut to a document, PDF etc. Right click -> open with -> select the program and tick "Always open using this program for this type of file". It has to be a shortcut for a document, not the document itself. Or at least, someone on our helpdesk was able to replicate by doing that. DrAlexanderTobacco fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Sep 10, 2013 |
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Sep 10, 2013 17:47
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DrAlexanderTobacco posted:.lnk with Irfanview for me. And of course she didn't know what irfanview is so she described it as "catsblast" (Referring to the logo). and youll probably need to delete the icon cache to fix the look of the icons. blackswordca fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Sep 10, 2013 |
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Sep 10, 2013 17:49
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Edit: Lot of posts while I was writing this. This is re: the boss who wanted a touchscreen laptop with a big screen for movies. Probably need to look at some of the smaller sellers rather than your Dell's and HPs of this world. The laptop will likely end up being a rebadged Clevo, but there's nothing wrong with that. I'm looking at a UK supplier that lets you customise your laptop down to what brand of memory, what drive and even which type of thermal paste you want. There's probably someone doing something similar in the US, maybe Sager? Lum fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Sep 10, 2013 |
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Sep 10, 2013 17:49
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And to think I almost took the support role there... Granted, I probably would have moved more into engineering/test since the position they offered was 50/50 anyway, and I got fired from the job I took instead 2 months later, but whatever. Where I am now seems to have survived the buyout phase (long before I got here) fairly well, in that we avoided getting moved to a tiered system and while there are metrics, management doesn't seem to do much with them beyond email them out. Presumably they get more use in consumer product support, I don't really know.
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Sep 10, 2013 18:08
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Our NOC/Networking guy is in AZ, working on our remote disaster recovery equipment. Our other NOC/Support guy is off because he is working all weekend and all next week to cover vacations. I am the only person for our NOC and Tier 1/2 phones from 7 AM - 7 PM today, tomorrow, and Thursday. Lots of tickets came in. I get to touch them all. Woo?
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Sep 10, 2013 18:54
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Lum posted:"Measure not what is important, but make important what you can measure" "You can't fatten a pig by weighing it" -Toxteth O'Grady, to every metric obsessed damager ever
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Sep 10, 2013 18:58
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fivre posted:And to think I almost took the support role there... Granted, I probably would have moved more into engineering/test since the position they offered was 50/50 anyway, and I got fired from the job I took instead 2 months later, but whatever. If you were one of my referrals, well, the support role you were originally applying for was with my group (the good side) and not the bullshit I went on about above. I've never referred someone to work directly in the parent company's support department. And I probably never will.
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Sep 10, 2013 19:23
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Toxteth OGrady posted:"You can't fatten a pig by weighing it" Ha I like that.
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Sep 10, 2013 19:25
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3 days, 3 hours and 30 minutes on the dot until I am done with my current job. Will have a week off in between my current and the next one, first time I'll be fully free of any sort of job and or schooling since I think high school. 0 Patience for anything and customers won't stop emailing me 
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Sep 10, 2013 19:31
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J posted:Shopping for laptops [...] I find myself unable to really put together the mix of options that I want. Typically it's not being able to put a goddamn SSD in the thing. Some of them seem to have some type of traditional hard drive + SSD cache option. Now I've never tried a laptop with an SSD cache like that - does it boot up fast like it would on a SSD? That's really what I care about. It doesn't seem to, in my experiences with it. It's far, far more effective in day to day operations. The SSD caching is provided by Intel "Smart Response Technology," which is partially driven by the 77 and 87 series chipsets but is only activated by a specific Windows service. We've deployed a dozen machines with it turned on, and nobody's complaining about speed. Then again we also deploy i5s with 8 GB of memory to everyone regardless of job function, so that also might have something to do with it.
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Sep 10, 2013 19:54
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blackswordca posted:I hit them with a $250 rear end in a top hat tax and for future work increase my rates. Once they settle up with you for all the back charges they owe, it's time for a new contract. One that specifies that they will pay up front for however many months of hosting and service they want. You can do this with technical support/maintenance hours too. They pay you now for X hours of tech support, maintenance, site updates, etc., that you provide when they need it. And enforce a minimum, like 10 hours or something. And feel free to tell them exactly why when bitch about it: because it was such a goddamned chore to get a damned nickel out of them when you had the old arrangement. They forfeited the convenience of billed service when they broke your professional trust and the contract that one of them signed. On a personal note, good for you for finally pushing back on something. I generally don't like conflict either and tend to want to be accommodating and compromise so everyone is happy. But as the entire thread has already pointed out, some people don't deserve that treatment. They deserve to be treated like children, who only get to play video games after they've done ALL their homework, and only get the cookie once they finish their vegetables. I know it can make one feel like an arrogant, entitled prick sometimes, but god dammit you are entitled to agreed-upon compensation for your time and effort. Keep it up dude.
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Sep 10, 2013 20:03
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Sab669 posted:3 days, 3 hours and 30 minutes on the dot until I am done with my current job. Will have a week off in between my current and the next one, first time I'll be fully free of any sort of job and or schooling since I think high school. 0 Patience for anything and customers won't stop emailing me I wish every week could be my last week on the job. Too bad it doesn't work that way.
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Sep 10, 2013 20:05
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ConfusedUs posted:If you were one of my referrals, well, the support role you were originally applying for was with my group (the good side) and not the bullshit I went on about above. I've never referred someone to work directly in the parent company's support department. And I probably never will. It was before the acquisition, so yeah. I do love trying to understand customers' weird routing topology. Instead of putting their firewall at the LAN/WAN border, it's behind a router, which can route to the internal network, internet, and DMZ. Its internal interface is the firewall's default gateway, so internet traffic hitting the firewall's external addresses (in a private address space) is routed out the firewall's internal interface. Now, this is theoretically fine, because it's all hitting the same router anyway, but the stateful filter isn't very happy when SYNACKs appear seemingly out of thin air on the internal interface, and why the hell would you do that anyway.
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Sep 10, 2013 20:20
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Che Delilas posted:Once they settle up with you for all the back charges they owe, it's time for a new contract. One that specifies that they will pay up front for however many months of hosting and service they want. You can do this with technical support/maintenance hours too. They pay you now for X hours of tech support, maintenance, site updates, etc., that you provide when they need it. And enforce a minimum, like 10 hours or something. I had already planned something like that but that depends on if I keep working with them when they do pay up. When the CEO spent an hour ripping into me with personal insults against myself, my family and vague threats that he'll destroy my career, he can go screw himself. This kind of response may work in whatever industry his professional company is servicing ( I want to say Oilfield ) but it wont work with me. For the record the CEO isn't the guy who I was referred to. My other contact is the one that worked with my father.
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Sep 10, 2013 20:22
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Renegret posted:I wish every week could be my last week on the job. Too bad it doesn't work that way.
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Sep 10, 2013 20:32
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Che Delilas posted:Once they settle up with you for all the back charges they owe, it's time for a new contract. One that specifies that they will pay up front for however many months of hosting and service they want. You can do this with technical support/maintenance hours too. They pay you now for X hours of tech support, maintenance, site updates, etc., that you provide when they need it. And enforce a minimum, like 10 hours or something. gently caress that. Once they've paid up stop working with them.
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Sep 10, 2013 20:39
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blackswordca posted:I had already planned something like that but that depends on if I keep working with them when they do pay up. When the CEO spent an hour ripping into me with personal insults against myself, my family and vague threats that he'll destroy my career, he can go screw himself. This kind of response may work in whatever industry his professional company is servicing ( I want to say Oilfield ) but it wont work with me. I've never been in this kind of situation but an alternative is to set your prices so ludicrously high that the only conclusion they could possibly reach is that you hate them and don't want to work for them anymore. That way if they do accept you can take pleasure in the fact that a day's work is getting you a 2 week vacation in Hawaii. And they're paying up front! Honestly it probably is best to just fire them if you are leaning that way already. Mental health is a vastly underrated thing for too many people.
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Sep 10, 2013 20:41
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Not sure if this has been covered before, but does anyone know of a little opensource desktop or web app that I can use for password resets within a specific department? It has came to my attention that an entire department pretty much shares logons currently because they have a ton of "part time" people. They are a 24 hour department, while our helpdesk is only 8-5, M-F. Managers/Supervisors will be in their own OU, with a nested OU for everyone else. I would like to have a little app or webpage where managers/supervisors can go into and are able to see all the user accounts in the OU below them, with the ability to do resets/unlocks. I'm pretty sure I could whip this up in Visual Studio, but if there is something out there already, it would be much easier.
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Sep 10, 2013 21:51
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Pfft, do it in PowerShell. What could possibly go wrong?
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Sep 10, 2013 22:34
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Moey posted:Not sure if this has been covered before, but does anyone know of a little opensource desktop or web app that I can use for password resets within a specific department? It has came to my attention that an entire department pretty much shares logons currently because they have a ton of "part time" people. They are a 24 hour department, while our helpdesk is only 8-5, M-F. What about remote server administration tools on a workstation plus delegated password reset rights? http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=7887
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Sep 10, 2013 22:56
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FuriousB posted:What about remote server administration tools on a workstation plus delegated password reset rights? That was my original suggestion when the idea came up, but working in the ADUC MMC apparently was voted "over their heads".... Maybe I'll just whip up something on my own. Make a service account that has delegated password reset rights in their OU. Then populate a dropdown box with all user names in that OU.
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Sep 10, 2013 23:01
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TWBalls posted:On very rare occasions we get tickets requesting toner carts. While we do keep the carts here in the I.T. department, it's been a long standing policy (well before I got here, and I've been here for 4 years come November) that they come pick them up themselves. If we're not here, the nursing supervisor has a key and can get it for them. Too difficult to manage the inventory if we let everybody and their mother replace cartridges... We had that problem in an auxilliary building... Cartridges were kept in an unlocked cabinet where cleanroom folk would occasionally store their shoes or large articles that didnt fit in their lockers... We get free supplies per our contract with Sharp but the only fatal flaw... the Sharp Business Services people are not mind readers and cannot predict when supplies will run out. Especially when manufacturing turds print out reams and reams of pointless paperwork. The practice continues, I found my giant sign "PLEASE NOTIFY IT IF YOU NEED A CARTRIDGE REPLACED" ripped off and discarded in the recycling bin once.
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Sep 10, 2013 23:16
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J posted:Shopping for laptops is pissing me off. I've been tasked with buying a kickass laptop for a C level. It's gotta look nice for presentations, have "a big screen for watching movies on" and also have a touchscreen, on a ~$1200-$1500ish budget. I'm really not sure why it has to have a touchscreen, and the touchscreen requirement is throwing a goddamn monkey wrench into this process. Having a touchscreen steers everything into the sleeker, lighter, more portable (read: smaller screen) type of laptop which isn't what I want here. Every time I try a different manufacturer's laptop customizer I find myself unable to really put together the mix of options that I want. Typically it's not being able to put a goddamn SSD in the thing. Some of them seem to have some type of traditional hard drive + SSD cache option. Now I've never tried a laptop with an SSD cache like that - does it boot up fast like it would on a SSD? That's really what I care about. We got a couple of the Samusng Ativ Book 8 for spoiled department heads (and now they don't even want them ) for around $1100, which meets all your requirements except for SSD. A higher priced model might have an SSD.Moey posted:Not sure if this has been covered before, but does anyone know of a little opensource desktop or web app that I can use for password resets within a specific department? It has came to my attention that an entire department pretty much shares logons currently because they have a ton of "part time" people. They are a 24 hour department, while our helpdesk is only 8-5, M-F. Check out making a TaskPad. You could just set it up so they open it, it lists their users, they select one and click reset password. It's basically just a wrapper around MMC, and it doesn't seem to really be developed but as long as MMC doesn't change it will keep working. Here's a couple links with some info about it: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/2816.how-to-create-custom-mmc-and-add-taskpad.aspx http://www.petri.co.il/create_taskpads_for_ad_operations.htm I'm using one myself for basically the same thing you're doing and it's working there, so I can probably answer any questions you might have about it.
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Sep 10, 2013 23:40
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FISHMANPET posted:Check out making a TaskPad. Thanks. This looks like it may do the trick. Time to play around with it!
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Sep 10, 2013 23:42
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drukqs posted:Too difficult to manage the inventory if we let everybody and their mother replace cartridges... We had that problem in an auxilliary building... Cartridges were kept in an unlocked cabinet where cleanroom folk would occasionally store their shoes or large articles that didnt fit in their lockers... We get free supplies per our contract with Sharp but the only fatal flaw... the Sharp Business Services people are not mind readers and cannot predict when supplies will run out. Especially when manufacturing turds print out reams and reams of pointless paperwork. Currently, the door to our office is locked at all hours, so they have to knock/ring door bell if they want in. Then we make them sign out carts so that when the vendor comes in to do inventory, they know pretty much right away how much of what to order. Supposedly in the future, they're supposed to set up monitoring so that when a printer is low on toner, they'll ship a new one out so that we always have some spares on hand. Of course, they also said that this was supposed to be set up shortly after they won the contract. They've been here for about a year now and when we inquired about it, they played dumb "Huh? I don't remember us saying anything about that. We can set it up, but it'll cost $$$". Why they want to charge us for setting up HP Web Jet admin which, if I'm not mistaken, should do all of that for free is beyond me.
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Sep 10, 2013 23:44
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ConfusedUs posted:And they won't run a test in their environment to /get/ the numbers they need. They want numbers to justify the numbers so their numbers continue to say the right things. Those are the easiest numbers to come up with, especially if you never tracked them. Make poo poo up and get some other people to make up supporting numbers. Make sure that the numbers for the budget are at least double than you actually need and numbers for metrics that they track are low enough to pass judgement and high enough that you won't kill yourself later.
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Sep 10, 2013 23:48
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Moey posted:That was my original suggestion when the idea came up, but working in the ADUC MMC apparently was voted "over their heads".... It comes with another tool, I forget what its called but its something like Active Directory User Management or something, it's a utility written in powershell (yet comes with a GUI, no command line) that's specifically for people who only need to work with user accounts doing password resets and such without mucking about creating/working with OU's. I'd have more info if I was at work but I never use it since I mostly work with GPOs.
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Sep 11, 2013 00:13
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God of Mischief posted:Those are the easiest numbers to come up with, especially if you never tracked them. Make poo poo up and get some other people to make up supporting numbers. Make sure that the numbers for the budget are at least double than you actually need and numbers for metrics that they track are low enough to pass judgement and high enough that you won't kill yourself later. We actually gave them numbers that were slightly inflated. We were told that they were "ridiculous" and there was "no way anything takes that long". Our "worst case scenario" numbers weren't even considered. Now, six months later, they're faced with the reality that everything is taking about 50% longer than our projected "worst case scenarios" because they didn't spend any time or money on training the new peons. They basically took our product and our customers, ignored everything we told them, and are now ridiculously over-budget and under-performing because they ignored everything. I'm so glad I don't have to deal with that directly anymore.
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Sep 11, 2013 00:35
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DrAlexanderTobacco posted:It's quite simple as to how to do it - Select a shortcut to a document, PDF etc. Right click -> open with -> select the program and tick "Always open using this program for this type of file". It has to be a shortcut for a document, not the document itself. I had to try this, but it didn't work for me. Win 7. I was sure you were going to be right and I would have another  Bill! WTF? moment.I created a non-priv account like our users are, I made a shortcut to an mp4 and a shortcut to a pdf. I don't have word on here but I assoc'ed the linked mp4 to imgburn and the pdf to crystal diskinfo, it didn't gently caress with any .lnks/shortcuts but simply associated all mp4s with imgburn, all pdfs with crystal. How did these users do it? Why does MS still have a way to break a core functionality? Another poster up higher said it always happens with word for him, happened with word at our place today happens with catsblast for you I guess I should try it with them, maybe something screwy with them instead of just windows. Vin BioEthanol fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Sep 11, 2013 |
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Sep 11, 2013 01:21
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Wagonburner posted:I had to try this, but it didn't work for me. Win 7. I was sure you were going to be right and I would have another Actually, I run into this sometimes at work. The users don't do anything to break it, it just "breaks" sometimes. A popular one we'll run into is .lnk will start opening as Adobe PDFs. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/19449-default-file-type-associations-restore.html This worked for me. One note, you need to have the user type in THEIR credentials. It'll say it failed, but just log out and back in and the problem will be fixed.
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Sep 11, 2013 01:54
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File extensions should have died with DOS, at least that's my offhand opinion. It always bothered me why Windows associates based on what basically amounts to verbiage that can change. I guess this problem isn't Windows specific either, but just one of those things we just accept as 'working good enough'. When or how a better way will come along is anyone's guess though.
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Sep 11, 2013 02:08
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tjl posted:File extensions should have died with DOS, at least that's my offhand opinion. It always bothered me why Windows associates based on what basically amounts to verbiage that can change. I guess this problem isn't Windows specific either, but just one of those things we just accept as 'working good enough'. When or how a better way will come along is anyone's guess though. I couldn't agree more. Funny enough, we were discussing how useful/useless file extensions at work the other day and you could easily point out the *nix/mac users and those who had used Windows all their life. The argument the Windows users kept making was "well, how would you know what program opens them if it didn't have a file extension?" which seems completely pointless if you can just change them and have them open in a different application. I'm still convinced they're horribly useless and Windows should make every effort to move away from them beyond just hiding them by default.
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Sep 11, 2013 02:43
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