Vista Upgrade: Bad Decision or Worst Decision?

Yesterday, Case Western Reserve University overhauled its internal software-providing website with a new design and, among other things, upgrade editions of Windows Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate.

Clearly, your God is a soulless pit of hatred for humanity.

Users, on the whole, are not smart. Microsoft's Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor certainly isn't infallible. And, luckily, there exists at least one program on the Case Software Center that, if you don't uninstall it before upgrading, will render your Vista upgrade hosed upon booting it the first time. This, friends, is what as known as a "recipe for disaster". We've already gotten our first ticket in about an issue in Vista, and it quite certainly won't be our last. I'm betting we're going to have to issue some sort of report on common issues in Vista and how to work around them, or we're going to be stuck reinstalling people's operating systems ten thousand times because they didn't uninstall Symantec Antivirus before they upgraded their system. This isn't even taking into account the number of people I've seen buying half-baked "budget" systems that come pre-installed with Vista Home Basic to go along with their Celeron M processors and 512 Mb RAM and onboard graphics (yes, someone brought that base system above in - I'm still trying to wash my hands of it) that will inevitably lead to a sour Vista taste in people's mouths.

If there's any upside to this, it may drive even more people over to the Mac side of the fence. One can only hope.

Here's to a long eternity of bailing users out of poor decision-making and worse operating systems.

Working Hard

Playing with our new Nerf guns.

Also, a user just called in who tried to install Office 2007 and somehow ended up reinstalling Windows.

What.

Diving In Slow Motion

Yeah, playing through Max Payne again.

I had three fillings done yesterday, which required my jaw to be fully extended for something like an hour and a half. As of lunchtime, I can just about open my mouth far enough to slide a sandwich in and take a bite. Hooray for lockjaw.

I scored a free LCD monitor today while performing a computer setup. It was cool with the IT people there, so I guess I lucked out (the power switch is broken so they probably would have tossed it anyways).

Besides that, work is going well. We're at record lows here, in the tens of tickets (fifteen, now). Of course, work is still diligently being done, as you can plainly see by this blog posting. At the very least, unlike Nick, my work does not consist of hours and hours of Wabble - just some Doom every now and then.

Back to reformattings.

Today, In The News

Man asks us to make his program install faster. Film at 11.

Let The Office Warfare Begin

For $7.99, how can you say no?

Case Of The Mondays

Well, that weekend blew by. In between seeing the Indians lose (great seats, boring game), Kevin's college grad party, cleaning, and Blood+, it feels like the weekend lasted about three hours.

So why am I so tired?

To illustrate, here's a simple diagram I whipped up.

Fig. 1: Qualitative sleepiness indicator

I'd get coffee but I'm currently holding down the office by my lonesome. The question is, how effective is a guard who is always asleep?

Great Success

I know that we take lots of things for granted in the computer world. I know that not everybody can be or should be a computer genius. I know that the reason that help desks exist is to take computers out of the equation to let people just work.

That really doesn't make it any easier to not shoot myself in the head.*

Today we got to experience several of the holy grails of tech support when a user called in for us to troubleshoot his copy of Eudora:

• An analyst of ours told the user to hit the "OK" button that just popped up on the screen; the user spent five minutes looking for the OK key on his keyboard.


• We decided it would be best to do a remote assistance session (like remote desktop through your browser). The user was unable to locate a web browser, yet was able to find the "Run..." command and enter the URL for the support page.


• The user spoke very slowly and read everything on his screen aloud.


• Remote assistance requires you to install an ActiveX control. A window pops to the forefront with a large arrow pointing to the Information Bar in Internet Explorer and instructing you to click on it to install the ActiveX control. The user lost this window and was unable to relocate it, causing the remote session to need to be started over.


• The user would randomly decide to right- or left-click on something and would not click the correct button when instructed to do so.

All told, what would normally be a 45-second setup took 45 minutes of coercing, prodding and swearing (to a muted handset) to accomplish. Now begins the actual task of, you know, figuring out what's wrong.

Technology: it makes the world go 'round.

* I actually like my job, I just sometimes wish people would let me do it.†

† Please don't fire me.

All Work And No Play

I keep forgetting that Case is not like high school in that stuff actually happens during the summer.

That said, I think we're more busy now than we were during the school year (or maybe my perspective is skewed by working nine hours a day rather than zero to three).

A Perspective on Customer Support

Fixing computers I can do. Taking calls I can do. Talking to people I can do.

What I can't do is confront people who call asking like I have the entire work history of the company because they are very important and we had an appointment with them and this would be a disaster if it weren't academia and I'm tech support, why can't I help them?

I fix computers, I'm not Raptor Jesus.

Ludicrosity

New bill contains provisions detailing exactly why it cannot be declared illegal to pass. In fact, pointing out the obvious and stating that it is a breach of democracy to bypass judicial review could land you in jail by breaching your allegiance to President Bush.

This game sucks.

Migraines also suck.

One game that does not suck, however, is Company of Heroes. Although it's the same group that made Dawn of War, Company of Heroes just seems more... awesome and less of a chore. It's hard to explain but it involves lots of awesome.

This is my second week working with PerceptIS (I started last Monday morning). It's... interesting. Dealing with users is always a good time, like the ones who turn their computer in on a Friday afternoon and come in Monday complaining their computer's not done yet... ahem. At least it's money, and I'm "in" the "industry" (inasmuch as technical support and counseling is the real "industry"). Woot.