So today was different....  I took my son of 7 with me to a couple of sites as Kirsty was busy having her hair cut.

Was it an issue.....? I don't think so; however will wait for the emails/calls from clients on Monday as they find that their flip charts have been all used up, polo's all eaten and desks rearranged.  7 year olds have the attention span slightly higher than a bored chicken (BIG GRIN).

 Was he good.......more or less yes, polite didn’t break anything (always a bonus) and generally sat and watched DVD's or drew.

 So this allowed me to sort out both clients with their issues.  One was a return of a repaired Dell machine which was riddled with viruses, bots and Trojans.  In this case the client wanted the machine to be configured for another role, so we installed a new hard disk and installed Windows from scratch.  The old hard disk was installed into a portable USB drive caddy.  Two bird’s one stone....

 Next client was that a hard drive in a mirrored pair had dropped out and needed replacing.  This fault had happened a couple of times so we decided to replace the drive this time.  Main reason for the failure is that it was a Fujitsu Server with an old ATA100 Raid 1 card installed.  (Not the best use of technology, however the installation was already in place so we could not do much about it).

Also whilst onsite, we discussed with the client any other issues, it transpired that one machine was slower than all of the rest, which seemed strange as the machines were near as identical.  A quick check in the bios led me to the issue being the workstation only had 256mb of ram and with a shared graphics adaptor the machine had less than 200mb to start with and was struggling with about 40mb fully booted.  Not a happy bunny one bit.  Luckily we all carry spare memory with us and I installed a brand new 512Mb module and the machine was ever so thankful.  We updated another machine onsite which was also low on memory and made note of the other machines that needed additional ram for a further site visit.

All in all a rewarding day, managed to spend a little time with Connor and fixed a few more issues for clients.

Thanks for reading

 Greg Sewell