Build a floor stand with an arm for a VESA-mount flat-panel monitor. (I've seen great articulating mounts for $50 at BJ's and Costco). Clamp the laptop to the stand near the bottom as part of the counterweights, and add a wireless keyboard & mouse combo.
The result: a computer that sits next to a recliner.
If you don't want it when you're done, take it to the nearest senior center or retirement home and plug it in there...
The correct way to do this is to install jacks but not plugs:
Run your cable on the premises, and terminate it with keystone jacks wired to the 568A or 568B standard (use either one, but use it everywhere in the building).
Use factory-produced patch cables to connect the devices to the jacks.
Face it: we don't have the right bulk cable, let alone the right plugs and tools, to make patch cables as reliable as a decent factory can. Wall jacks, OTOH, are designed to be wired by electricians. They are pretty much idiot-resistant.
$100K per week: at about fifty bucks per victim, comes out to two thousand people getting robbed every week.
After all that, one article in the WaPo gets it shut down?
As much as I dislike Symantec and their products, they had no obligation to fix pre-existing problems on an infested system.
there's a real Netiquette problem here
on
Linked In Or Out?
·
· Score: 1
Several of my friends don't seem to understand that it is inappropriate to provide someone's private Email address to anybody without their consent in advance.
That's the bottom line here: an Email that says, "Invitation to connect on LinkedIn" really means "Some idiot gave us your Email address, and we will pester you until you give us more information."
It's just as bad as an E-greeting card, or "click to Email this article." STOP DOING IT.
People ask what I charge on the initial phone call, and they pay when the work is done. It's the least traumatic part, actually. If someone refuses to pay -- it has happened exactly twice in four years -- I just drive away: the police won't help, and Small Claims court is a huge waste of time.
About 70% of new callers have malware issues. The rest run the full spectrum from true PEBKAC to cat hair in the vents: today, I got ninety bucks for un-checking "Mute" in the Volume Control applet (although I was there for about half an hour, checking for malware and giving advice). My ad says "your call is answered by the same Microsoft Certified Professional who will come to your home or office," and this is a big selling point for people who have bounced from Dell Support to the Geek Squad's credit-card collection team. After I establish myself with the customer, I get their new PC & peripheral setups, along with any future problems & infestations. I have several customers with multiple PCs who have spent well over $1000 each over the years.
The number in my ad is my cell phone. I answer all my own calls, and usually schedule jobs for the same day or the next day. I often tell new customers "We accept Visa, MC, and cash" if I'm unsure about their checks (e.g., if they live in a trailer park or a crappy apartment complex). I have a concealed carry permit, so I'm not too afraid of bad neighborhoods... but I don't take unnecessary risks, as it doesn't make me bulletproof. I only have two or three (business) customers who don't pay upon completion, and their checks arrive within the week; my A/R balance is $0.00 right now.
One of the most important things, IMHO, is knowing how, when, and to whom to say "NO." I don't get sucked into working for people who think $90/hour is exorbitant, and I routinely decline to work on Win9x. I don't fix video games or hook up HDTV's. I usually turn down obvious major electrical problems like lightning strikes, and I don't do internal hardware work on laptops. I don't provide phone support to anyone, even family: within 60 seconds of answering the phone, I have usually said "I would be glad to take a look at the machine." This separates the real customers from people who are fishing for free advice. (However, I will often tell a caller something like "You don't need me: tell Verizon you have a bad FIOS router" because I don't want to knowingly charge for an obvious one-sentence fix). My goal is to accumulate 1200 customers who spend an average of $100 per year, so I can easily live without the most annoying 2 or 3 percent of the customers I meet on the way to that goal.
Four years ago, I hung my shingle (in the local Yellow Pages) and "retired" from corporate IT. I fix home computers for ninety bucks an hour. I have about 700 customers so far, and almost all of them would call me exclusively for future repairs. I pick up at least two or three -- sometimes a dozen or more -- new customers per week through the ad in the phone book. It's truly a part-time job: some days I'm swamped, and other days I'm dead in the water... but I set my own schedule, and I have a very low overhead (the phone book ad is the biggest line item).
If you have a reliable car, are very skilled at desktop support, and don't mind dealing with people, it's a great way to go.
How will Yahoo sell these computers without all the crapware kickbacks they accept? Will all those companies create open-source crapware to clutter up the desktop?
Will the Firefox title bar say "provided by Yahoo!"?
I order three or four PCs each week for my customers, who are home users.
Each time, I go on Dell's small-business site, and choose a Vostro with "Vista Business Bonus - XP Professional Preinstalled."
My stepson, an avid FPS gamer, joined the Army in 1999. They put him in an ultra-realistic tank simulator, and he destroyed everything that moved on the virtual battlefield. When he came out, they were all standing there staring at him...
He asked, "What are you looking at?" They replied, almost in unison, "A tanker."
He ended up driving a tank to Baghdad with the elite 3rd Squadron of the 7th Cavalry, and fought in the only force-on-force tank battle of the war at Objective Montgomery (out near the airport).
I bought an OEM copy of Vista Ultimate for my HP DV9000-series laptop. I ran it for about a year until the motherboard failed (under warranty), and then built it out with XP Pro when it came back.
I miss the Sidebar, but I don't miss needing 2 GB of RAM and 256 MB of video memory just to run kinda slowly.
One of my PC repair customers upgraded his Dell desktop to Vista, and I told him at the time, "You'll be back to XP someday." He called me last week to do the "downgrade." Turns out his [aftermarket ATI] video card was failing, and he blamed the display issues on Vista. (I took the card out, and ended up installing his OEM copy of XP for him anyway).
I was happily working as a desktop support engineer, when suddenly my employer sent me off to be the technical lead on a client's Help Desk. At the time, I really dreaded the move. However, I was able to make a lot of progress for the client -- standardizing Help Desk procedures, documenting handoff procedures to (and responsibilities of) other teams within IT, and coming up with some technical stuff they hadn't even imagined. (Two words: "batch file"). Then, in 2003, my company tried to sell the client on a Windows XP image project... and they agreed, provided that I was the lead engineer! My company objected, because I had never done such a project, but the client insisted: me, or nobody. I ended up designing a very successful XP image (and its creation process) for several thousand desktops, and became my company's lead XP Image Design SME.
The client's main reason for insisting I lead the project: they knew I was intimately familiar with the type of calls their Help Desk was receiving from the old Win2K image, and figured I would eliminate enough Help Desk calls to pay for the entire project over time.
After one false start a few days ago, caused when someone posted build 3311 (a release candidate) as the final RTM, I downloaded the final release this morning. I immediately slipstreamed it into a (XP Pro SP2) CD folder, threw an answer file winnt.sif into the i386 directory, and burned a bootable CD. Then, I swapped a blank hard disk into this very HP DV9000 laptop, and did the clean unattended SP3 build. The build went OK, I installed all my apps with few surprises, and now I'm back up on my old user profile (since I'm on a domain, it even remembers my stored passwords).
A few observations: --They didn't add too many drivers: SP3.CAB (which presumably includes all the contents of SP2.CAB) is only 19587 KB in size, a mere 7 percent larger than the SP2 driver file released in August 2004. --I don't think any of those added drivers helped my DV9000: I ended up installing every single device I had to update a few months ago when I last did a clean SP2 install. --They did, at least, include the High-Definition Audio update in SP3. This is helpful, since Microsoft no longer offers the update for download; building a clean SP2 box with HD Audio previously required one to find a copy somewhere else before the sound -- and often the modem -- drivers would work. --It doesn't include IE7, and my customized Google installer wouldn't work on the SP3 installation, so I had to get it from Windows Update. --As one might expect, it saved quite a bit of time on the post-build Windows Updates. Not counting IE7, Office or hardware drivers, this particular machine has only downloaded half a dozen updates so far.
Does this mean Microsoft will again be able to provide their Java virtual machine? http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=msjavavm
I'm getting tired of stripping [this week's version of] Sun Java off new PCs and installing the M$ VM, but it's necessary to get them running right (and to get rid of the coffee-cup "automatic update" marketing crapola).
The only criteria anyone should care about is whether M$ will allow its manufacturer to sell XP on it.
It will be three years before enough laptop hardware to run Vi$ta 'quickly' will cost less than $1500. I would urge all the OEMs to push that definition as hard as they can.
I've thought about buying a Prius, but they lack the massive quality problems and terrible fit & finish that come standard with every Volkswagen model.
Now I can save the planet even more: on the days it's in the shop for warranty repairs, it will consume no fuel!
I have a customer in a rural area with two laptops and no available broadband service. They have two Sprint cards, because it's all they can get. The biggest problem, other than performance -- I've seen up to 800Kbps sustained downloads, but the latency kills when surfing -- is that two cards cost twice as much as one card, which is twice as much as Comca$t would charge for broadband [6 Mbps down / 350 Kbps up] if it were available.
Everything I learned as a kid is obselete now...
on
Obsolete Technical Skills
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
My father and I worked on old Saabs, way back when they were cool. He was a self-taught engineer: he had a Civil Service equivalency, no college degree, and worked as an engineer for the FAA. He was the master at converting 3-cylinder Saab 96 (and 95) models to the newer V4 engine. He had it down to a science, and cars we converted ran all over the country.
A few of the more mundane skills I learned back then: --Setting the dwell angle by adjusting the ignition points, then rotating the distributor to set the ignition timing. --Disconnecting the ringer on Western Electric rotary-dial phones, so Ma Bell couldn't detect how many extentions you had (illegally) connected to your line. --Dialing only the last 5 digits of a 7-digit phone number: within the same exchange, the mechanical switches at the local Bell office would make the connection. --Scraping conducting material off the rotary dial in the cable box to enable HBO and Showtime.
I frequently find myself in the exact situation for which this project was intended: I've just done a clean build of Windows XP SP2, and it's time to bring it up to date.
However, I prefer to change the sequence up a bit:
-- Run a scripted build from a modified SP2 CD.
-- Install all the 'inside-the-case' hardware drivers: IMHO, Windows Setup isn't complete until Device Manager is clean.
-- Install the Micro$oft Java VM, and its latest updated version (must be done as two steps, thanks to $un).
-- Install a Google-tweaked version of IE7.
-- Install the latest versions of Flash Player, QuickTime, Real Alternative, and Nero.
-- Install Media Player 10 (which reclaims all the file associations that Media Player can handle).
-- If the machine will get Office, install it.
-- Finally, open the Windows Update page, and immediately click over to Micro$oft Update. Choose the options to hide Media Player 11, and any video driver updates from M$ (they usually break things). Launch the process. Go to lunch.
If the project included an option for starting with a machine that already has IE7, has the M$ Java, and is meant to be left with MP10, it would be perfect for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Build a floor stand with an arm for a VESA-mount flat-panel monitor. (I've seen great articulating mounts for $50 at BJ's and Costco). Clamp the laptop to the stand near the bottom as part of the counterweights, and add a wireless keyboard & mouse combo.
The result: a computer that sits next to a recliner.
If you don't want it when you're done, take it to the nearest senior center or retirement home and plug it in there...
The AC beat me to it: the Woodlawn data warehouse is diagrammed perfectly in Live Free or Die Hard.
They could hire Justin Long (and John Hodgman?) to conduct guided tours...
The correct way to do this is to install jacks but not plugs:
Run your cable on the premises, and terminate it with keystone jacks wired to the 568A or 568B standard (use either one, but use it everywhere in the building).
Use factory-produced patch cables to connect the devices to the jacks.
Face it: we don't have the right bulk cable, let alone the right plugs and tools, to make patch cables as reliable as a decent factory can.
Wall jacks, OTOH, are designed to be wired by electricians. They are pretty much idiot-resistant.
Someone actually shipped a car that was exactly as advertised, and a massage didn't have a happy ending.
$100K per week: at about fifty bucks per victim, comes out to two thousand people getting robbed every week.
After all that, one article in the WaPo gets it shut down?
As much as I dislike Symantec and their products, they had no obligation to fix pre-existing problems on an infested system.
Several of my friends don't seem to understand that it is inappropriate to provide someone's private Email address to anybody without their consent in advance.
That's the bottom line here: an Email that says, "Invitation to connect on LinkedIn" really means "Some idiot gave us your Email address, and we will pester you until you give us more information."
It's just as bad as an E-greeting card, or "click to Email this article." STOP DOING IT.
People ask what I charge on the initial phone call, and they pay when the work is done. It's the least traumatic part, actually.
If someone refuses to pay -- it has happened exactly twice in four years -- I just drive away: the police won't help, and Small Claims court is a huge waste of time.
About 70% of new callers have malware issues. The rest run the full spectrum from true PEBKAC to cat hair in the vents: today, I got ninety bucks for un-checking "Mute" in the Volume Control applet (although I was there for about half an hour, checking for malware and giving advice). My ad says "your call is answered by the same Microsoft Certified Professional who will come to your home or office," and this is a big selling point for people who have bounced from Dell Support to the Geek Squad's credit-card collection team.
After I establish myself with the customer, I get their new PC & peripheral setups, along with any future problems & infestations. I have several customers with multiple PCs who have spent well over $1000 each over the years.
The number in my ad is my cell phone. I answer all my own calls, and usually schedule jobs for the same day or the next day. I often tell new customers "We accept Visa, MC, and cash" if I'm unsure about their checks (e.g., if they live in a trailer park or a crappy apartment complex). I have a concealed carry permit, so I'm not too afraid of bad neighborhoods... but I don't take unnecessary risks, as it doesn't make me bulletproof. I only have two or three (business) customers who don't pay upon completion, and their checks arrive within the week; my A/R balance is $0.00 right now.
One of the most important things, IMHO, is knowing how, when, and to whom to say "NO." I don't get sucked into working for people who think $90/hour is exorbitant, and I routinely decline to work on Win9x. I don't fix video games or hook up HDTV's. I usually turn down obvious major electrical problems like lightning strikes, and I don't do internal hardware work on laptops. I don't provide phone support to anyone, even family: within 60 seconds of answering the phone, I have usually said "I would be glad to take a look at the machine." This separates the real customers from people who are fishing for free advice. (However, I will often tell a caller something like "You don't need me: tell Verizon you have a bad FIOS router" because I don't want to knowingly charge for an obvious one-sentence fix).
My goal is to accumulate 1200 customers who spend an average of $100 per year, so I can easily live without the most annoying 2 or 3 percent of the customers I meet on the way to that goal.
Four years ago, I hung my shingle (in the local Yellow Pages) and "retired" from corporate IT. I fix home computers for ninety bucks an hour. I have about 700 customers so far, and almost all of them would call me exclusively for future repairs. I pick up at least two or three -- sometimes a dozen or more -- new customers per week through the ad in the phone book.
It's truly a part-time job: some days I'm swamped, and other days I'm dead in the water... but I set my own schedule, and I have a very low overhead (the phone book ad is the biggest line item).
If you have a reliable car, are very skilled at desktop support, and don't mind dealing with people, it's a great way to go.
How will Yahoo sell these computers without all the crapware kickbacks they accept?
Will all those companies create open-source crapware to clutter up the desktop?
Will the Firefox title bar say "provided by Yahoo!"?
I order three or four PCs each week for my customers, who are home users.
Each time, I go on Dell's small-business site, and choose a Vostro with "Vista Business Bonus - XP Professional Preinstalled."
They ship it. No problem.
My stepson, an avid FPS gamer, joined the Army in 1999. They put him in an ultra-realistic tank simulator, and he destroyed everything that moved on the virtual battlefield. When he came out, they were all standing there staring at him...
He asked, "What are you looking at?"
They replied, almost in unison, "A tanker."
He ended up driving a tank to Baghdad with the elite 3rd Squadron of the 7th Cavalry, and fought in the only force-on-force tank battle of the war at Objective Montgomery (out near the airport).
...oh wait, it's the UK: only criminals have guns.
I bought an OEM copy of Vista Ultimate for my HP DV9000-series laptop. I ran it for about a year until the motherboard failed (under warranty), and then built it out with XP Pro when it came back.
I miss the Sidebar, but I don't miss needing 2 GB of RAM and 256 MB of video memory just to run kinda slowly.
One of my PC repair customers upgraded his Dell desktop to Vista, and I told him at the time, "You'll be back to XP someday."
He called me last week to do the "downgrade." Turns out his [aftermarket ATI] video card was failing, and he blamed the display issues on Vista. (I took the card out, and ended up installing his OEM copy of XP for him anyway).
I was happily working as a desktop support engineer, when suddenly my employer sent me off to be the technical lead on a client's Help Desk. At the time, I really dreaded the move.
However, I was able to make a lot of progress for the client -- standardizing Help Desk procedures, documenting handoff procedures to (and responsibilities of) other teams within IT, and coming up with some technical stuff they hadn't even imagined. (Two words: "batch file").
Then, in 2003, my company tried to sell the client on a Windows XP image project... and they agreed, provided that I was the lead engineer! My company objected, because I had never done such a project, but the client insisted: me, or nobody.
I ended up designing a very successful XP image (and its creation process) for several thousand desktops, and became my company's lead XP Image Design SME.
The client's main reason for insisting I lead the project: they knew I was intimately familiar with the type of calls their Help Desk was receiving from the old Win2K image, and figured I would eliminate enough Help Desk calls to pay for the entire project over time.
After one false start a few days ago, caused when someone posted build 3311 (a release candidate) as the final RTM, I downloaded the final release this morning. I immediately slipstreamed it into a (XP Pro SP2) CD folder, threw an answer file winnt.sif into the i386 directory, and burned a bootable CD.
Then, I swapped a blank hard disk into this very HP DV9000 laptop, and did the clean unattended SP3 build.
The build went OK, I installed all my apps with few surprises, and now I'm back up on my old user profile (since I'm on a domain, it even remembers my stored passwords).
A few observations:
--They didn't add too many drivers: SP3.CAB (which presumably includes all the contents of SP2.CAB) is only 19587 KB in size, a mere 7 percent larger than the SP2 driver file released in August 2004.
--I don't think any of those added drivers helped my DV9000: I ended up installing every single device I had to update a few months ago when I last did a clean SP2 install.
--They did, at least, include the High-Definition Audio update in SP3. This is helpful, since Microsoft no longer offers the update for download; building a clean SP2 box with HD Audio previously required one to find a copy somewhere else before the sound -- and often the modem -- drivers would work.
--It doesn't include IE7, and my customized Google installer wouldn't work on the SP3 installation, so I had to get it from Windows Update.
--As one might expect, it saved quite a bit of time on the post-build Windows Updates. Not counting IE7, Office or hardware drivers, this particular machine has only downloaded half a dozen updates so far.
Does this mean Microsoft will again be able to provide their Java virtual machine?
http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=msjavavm
I'm getting tired of stripping [this week's version of] Sun Java off new PCs and installing the M$ VM, but it's necessary to get them running right (and to get rid of the coffee-cup "automatic update" marketing crapola).
Then, the proles can install Kazaa and LimeWire... and put the shares on the corporate servers.
Yes, I've seen that done.
The only criteria anyone should care about is whether M$ will allow its manufacturer to sell XP on it.
It will be three years before enough laptop hardware to run Vi$ta 'quickly' will cost less than $1500. I would urge all the OEMs to push that definition as hard as they can.
I've thought about buying a Prius, but they lack the massive quality problems and terrible fit & finish that come standard with every Volkswagen model.
Now I can save the planet even more: on the days it's in the shop for warranty repairs, it will consume no fuel!
I have a customer in a rural area with two laptops and no available broadband service. They have two Sprint cards, because it's all they can get.
The biggest problem, other than performance -- I've seen up to 800Kbps sustained downloads, but the latency kills when surfing -- is that two cards cost twice as much as one card, which is twice as much as Comca$t would charge for broadband [6 Mbps down / 350 Kbps up] if it were available.
My father and I worked on old Saabs, way back when they were cool. He was a self-taught engineer: he had a Civil Service equivalency, no college degree, and worked as an engineer for the FAA.
He was the master at converting 3-cylinder Saab 96 (and 95) models to the newer V4 engine. He had it down to a science, and cars we converted ran all over the country.
A few of the more mundane skills I learned back then:
--Setting the dwell angle by adjusting the ignition points, then rotating the distributor to set the ignition timing.
--Disconnecting the ringer on Western Electric rotary-dial phones, so Ma Bell couldn't detect how many extentions you had (illegally) connected to your line.
--Dialing only the last 5 digits of a 7-digit phone number: within the same exchange, the mechanical switches at the local Bell office would make the connection.
--Scraping conducting material off the rotary dial in the cable box to enable HBO and Showtime.
I frequently find myself in the exact situation for which this project was intended: I've just done a clean build of Windows XP SP2, and it's time to bring it up to date.
However, I prefer to change the sequence up a bit:
-- Run a scripted build from a modified SP2 CD.
-- Install all the 'inside-the-case' hardware drivers: IMHO, Windows Setup isn't complete until Device Manager is clean.
-- Install the Micro$oft Java VM, and its latest updated version (must be done as two steps, thanks to $un).
-- Install a Google-tweaked version of IE7.
-- Install the latest versions of Flash Player, QuickTime, Real Alternative, and Nero.
-- Install Media Player 10 (which reclaims all the file associations that Media Player can handle).
-- If the machine will get Office, install it.
-- Finally, open the Windows Update page, and immediately click over to Micro$oft Update. Choose the options to hide Media Player 11, and any video driver updates from M$ (they usually break things). Launch the process. Go to lunch.
If the project included an option for starting with a machine that already has IE7, has the M$ Java, and is meant to be left with MP10, it would be perfect for me.
If he had done just a little better and out-polled Gu9/11ani, I would have needed a roll of paper towels to clean up my happiness.