(no subject)

[mtupyro.livejournal.com]

We don't service personal computers. If it's the department chair or an important professor, we may work on a personal laptop. But we don't touch student's personal machines. Ever. So why have I spent the last 2 days clearing spyware infections off of an undergrad's personal machine?

$BOSS: "His mom called, and I felt bad."

Grrrrrrrrr.

He had limewire installed and running under an admin account. Along with Norton. *gazes into the heavens* NORTON!!

It's getting a fresh format and install after I backed up what documents I could find. I fought the spyware, and the spyware won.

I'm really tempted to contact his mother and show her just what I found when cleaning out her little boy's computer. Still think he needs his computer for school mommy?

Long time lurker

[leetmasterjames.livejournal.com]

I work at a small repair shop. We have some corporate accounts and many home and small business users. Ive just had the displeasure of working with an old man with the attention span of a 5 year old and a low hearing aid battery.
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(no subject)

[random-c.livejournal.com]

...no, I cannot 'just put 2000 on it', it is stickered for 98SE.
...no, I cannot 'just put XPembedded on it', it is stickered for Vista Business, and apart from which we're out of build PIDs, which I told several people including the CTO about a couple of months ago.
...no, I cannot 'reuse an old license' it doesn't work like that.
You muppets might not think that licensing is important, but if I let you get away with this and MS found out, it would probably put the company out of business.
So, unless someone's going to make Dev start porting to linux, someone needs to start spending. *sigh*

Happiness is...

[toxico.livejournal.com]

...testing the help desk voice mail system and, knowing they check messages on speakerphone, leaving this for them to happen upon.

Notes from the Pit of Awesome

[wxgeek.livejournal.com]

"should I delete virus infected pgms, yes. junk filenames, yeah del 'em..."

Verbatim. Copy/pasted. Our tech, he is schizophrenic!

Toshiba Portegé...the new face of fail

[drquuxum.livejournal.com]

Oh, Toshiba Portegé, you have given me a new mental image for "FAIL".

It's a Tablet PC, so rebuilding it is already ten times harder than it needs to be. But, yes! Toshiba must make it even harder, in case your system gets the almightly pwn (I think I've already ranted about unsafe swapping of USB drives while your antivirus is disabled....)

Toshiba has made it so it can only boot to a select subset of CD/DVD drives -- like the ones you don't have unless you shelled out for a $500 one at the time of purchasing this hunkacrap.

All is not lost, though. You can also boot to the SD reader...if you've made a bootable SD card before-hand using the Toshiba SD Boot Utility, which only runs with that same machine. But, hey, making a bootable SD card just to recover from a system crash is something everyone does, right?

It took me two days before I gave up on it and sent it back. It came back with its standard install image...without patches. Luckily I got to it before $LUSER did (who would, no doubt, hook it up to a wide-open network where it would instantly pwned).

Phrase of the day: "Freudian Slip"

[superbus.livejournal.com]

Looking at three spam tickets in a row ("Why did this get through your filter?" "Because God hates you and your small penis"), and then knocking out a really quick email quota increase is a VERY bad thing...

"Yes, this is $ME with $COMPANY! I just called to let you know that I reset $USER'S penis si-- QUOTA SIZE! QUOTA SIZE! EMAIL QUOTA SIZE! ... Uh, from 100MB to 200MB..." This was an EXACT quote.

Thankfully, he was good spirited enough to laugh and tell a joke about it. I even got a good survey out of it. Could have been worse. But DAMN, could that have been taken the wrong way...