At work, when the (college) student workers cannot resolve an issue, I’m the last stop in our support line. As a result, I sometimes get computers for which there is nothing we can do about it. For example, I had two Acer desktops a couple weeks ago, nearly the same model, crash and these came into the office. Everything I tried didn’t get the computers working, but part of that is due to the fact that the CDs provided consistently encountered errors; all other hardware appeared to function correctly. I had to tell the students that the computers needed more work than we could do, and fortunately, one of the computers was still under warranty. Today I had a student pick up another laptop which had, from what I could tell, a dead hard drive, as a spare hard drive was detected by the system in BIOS, whereas the original was not.
That’s one of the most frustrating things I have to deal with when working on someone else’s computer: having to be right about what I’m telling them. I mean, I don’t have to be right, but I don’t feel right telling them something that might be false. It’s part of the reason that fixing a computer with an issue, or even correctly diagnosing the issue, is such an accomplishment; it gives me something to push off of. At least I’ll be 1-1 this week, as the second computer is working, and should be back with the student tomorrow.
October 24, 2006 at 12:23
· Filed under Uncategorized
About a week ago I posted two search plugins, one of IEEE OUI and one for RCC. Now that I’ve taken the time to get Firefox 2, I noticed that there was a different way do search plugins. So, without further ado, you can download the IEEE OUI or RCC Search files.
However, you can just go up to the search bar, and install it that way without having to download the files, browse to c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins and drag and drop, as I made sure to include the HTML code to allow autodiscovery. Mind you that if you have both of them installed already, they won’t appear in the search drop down menu.
October 17, 2006 at 07:36
· Filed under Uncategorized
At work, we assist students with registering their computers on the network, as well as their gaming consoles. If I happen to be the one to register the gaming device, I tend to check the hardware address by doing a OUI at http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/index.shtml. Even though the page is in my Firefox bookmark toolbar, I looked for a way to make the process more efficient. The only thing left to do, short of memorizing the entire listing, was cut down or eliminate the time it took wait for the page to load and place focus on the input box. I could only think of one way: make a Mozilla-Search plugin.
I was reminded of a search plugin a former employee, Joe, had made to search our website’s wiki installation. I doubt few people currently use it right now, but there it is. A quick Google search later, some testing, and I had a IEEE OUI search plugin ready to go.
To install the plugins:
Extract the .src and .gif (or .png) files to the plugin directory, which is typically found in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins
Close Firefox
Open Firefox
To use the search features, the following are the most useful searches:
By hex value, e.g. 00-12-5a
By base 16, e.g. 00125a
By company, e.g. Microsoft
You can use this to search anything in the OUI listing, but those searches listed above give you the most important results.
So, while working on some stuff at work, I got an IM from my friend Pete. He works in Philadelphia in the public school system as tech support. The issue he was facing involved an iMac G5 that was overheating and not turning on. I did some quick research and found two pages, one blog titled iMac G5: overheating problems, which references a document on the Apple site titled About the iMac G5 diagnostic LEDs, as well as another page at Apple title iMac G5 Repair Extension Program for Video and Power Issues.
Why do I call this a benefit? Because, without IM, I probably wouldn’t been able to hear about my friend’s issue or have a reason to look up information about overheating G5′s. Without looking up that information, I wouldn’t have found out that our G5′s in the office, and thus, in our computer labs, fall in the range of serial numbers that might have this problem. Now we’ll be prepared for this in case it starts happening. According to the page at Apple, the overheating/power issue may be caused by something else, or may not be an issue, but it’s good to know.
And knowing is half the battle. Yo Joe!
This isn’t the first time that I’ve talked to my friends about computer tech support issues at work. It’s helpful, as we know that each of us have certain areas in which we excel, and that we can get assistance, albeit limited, through IM. It is kind of like parallel computation. My friend and I are going to be researching the same item (possibly with different search engines and terms and people) and throwing the answers back and forth. Somewhere along the line, one of us will reference something the other one missed, which may or may not be the answer. Eventually, the desired result, if there is one, will be found.
The main reason I commented on this is because it happened recently and I learned something which makes me valuable to my organization. Using IM software, or even the Internet/web, to do this is nothing new. I really can’t imagine trying to get work done without it.