IT BS thread

Those are invaluable as well

 

http://ubcd4win.com/

this one saved my ass i don't know how many times. Problem is they haven't updated it beyond WinPE 1.0. Doesn't work well on newer systems.

 

If I had a nickel for everytime an ATI/AMD driver made a computer bluescreen.. I would have about 10 cents because I boycott that garbage.

 

ATI's drivers and software have ALWAYS been shit. Just like they suck more power and run hotter for the same performance.

BUT, they also occasionally knock it out of the park with raw performance, so they keep intel/nvidia on their toes.

 

DUDE!!! I need many of those!

 

Other than boot disks, hands-down the handiest thing to keep around.

#3 on my list of never-leave-home-without-it is bootable USB thumb drives with various flavors of OS on it. My 8GB Cruzer that is bootable with Win7-64bit-SP1 and Office 2010 (ready for a key) begins to smoulder on some days.

Now that bootable USB is the norm on motherboards, I can start with a blank hard drive and have a patched, current desktop for a user in about an hour, fully ready for day to day office work. Its a beautiful thing, man.

 

Just fixed my mother's laptop. Win 7 was telling her "The User Profile Service failed the login". It's been some time since I've had to hack a registry, but good as new

 

not when ATI actually has their own devs before amd fired them

 

Another Chad, that does IT, in Des Moines, on Tacomaworld. What are the chances?

 

Secret santa

 

Anyone a Storage admin? If so how do you like it and what kinda of skill set is required? I work in a data center now as a servicedesk tech and part hardware person. Trying to figure out if I want to do full hardware going forward or try something else. Working for EMC seems like it would best of both worlds but I don't know what storage people do really.

 

Not really just a storage admin exclusively - IMHO the best plan is to become as well rounded as you can (better to know a little of a lot than a lot of a little) so you will be able to be highly adaptable to any position that comes your way. I am pretty much a one man show, running the SAN, VM's, switches and routers, exchange, intranet with LAMP, etc.

Knowing the core stuff and how to find the answers to stuff you don't know is a much more valuable asset then getting pigeonholed into one particular discipline looking forward (again, IMHO)

 

I just had that with one workstation at a client. Win 7 doing an 'upgrade' of the ProLaw software. During the rollout, the 'changes' to her profile on the local box (ODBC pointers and network drive mappings) shit the bed and corrupted the local profile.

Like you, had to go in as local admin and scrub the registry by hand, changing the profile pointers for a bunch of default actions to the correct place. Took about an hour, giant PITA that it was.

 

there are 3 TW IT Geeks in DSM? who knew. I'm just not named chad and neither is "chad"

 

I have run large, mixed storage systems. Mostly in the semiconductor industry. By mixed, I mean vendor, operating system and type.

In our environment, we managed day to day storage requirements (quotas, volume configuration, network configuration, backup and restores, etc.), system upgrades, system repair (almost any component), new installation and evaluation of new hardware configuration.

To effectively manage the data, it helps to have a good understanding of how your customer uses the environment. In the semiconductor world, for example, we create and delete a large number of files from a large number of machines using a wide variety of different software tools.

Most of the customer interaction was gathering information on requirements and schedules, helping them understand tool flows and ways to improve performance of the flows, helping diagnose tool problems (settings can cause a tool to create larger than usual files that run them out of quota).

Depending on your environment, it can be pretty interesting. Especially if you work with data compression or larger, interconnected storage environments or offsite volume replication.

It can be pretty interesting but expect periods of boring.

 

The company I work for now is in the semiconductor industry as well ! - pretty cool stuff down at the nanometer level

 

What's the old adage, about long periods of nothing with bursts of intense excitement?

I think it was in relation to being an airline pilot, the first time I heard it, but it works well for us IT folks too

 

Usually, the bursts come at the wrong time too

 

Truth.

 

*Heads to IOWA thread to further BS*