The Pinged Hobbit

One thing I hate is being lied to. I like honesty, tell me the truth and I might be a bit upset but I will appreciate you for it. You will go up in my estimations for your honesty. Tell me a lie that I find out about and well, you’re in for a quick route to my most hated list. One thing is for sure I won’t do any kind of business with you. I’m not the only person with this point of view I am sure, everyone hates being lied to and in this day of search engines it’s much easier to be caught out than you would think. Continue reading »

One of the points I stressed when I talked about how to be good at IT support was being able to access the computer of the person you are trying to support. The hardest part about supporting some one is getting an understanding of what is actually happening on screen. Human beings make very bad eye witnesses, they have a tendency to put their own interpretation on to what they see. Sometimes adding information, sometimes missing out things they don’t see as being relevant. Plus the person you are supporting will have a tendancy to try to hide anything they might have done that caused the error (and as any support person knows 90% of all errors are user related). Continue reading »

One of the problems about knowing anything about IT is that family and friends are always asking you for advice or help with their computer problems. I don’t mind helping when I can but it can be damn annoying at times. Recently I’ve encountered two computers where the are reporting that the PC was infected by a trojan and that the only way to remove it was by downloading and paying for some supposedly great anti virus software that most people have never heard of. Now people like me are technically savvy enough to know that quite a lot of links are not safe to download. Unfortunately not everyone who uses a computer knows to stop and think before they download something. they just merrily click on a link and let something download to our pc.

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I’ve already mentioned one aspect of my job when I talked about being a Good IT Trainer. But training users in how to operate the software isn’t the only aspect of my job. Another part of my work is the installation of the software, hardware and setting the software up to client specifications. The setup and installation of a software can be more trouble some than training people it’s use (although that of course depends on the caliber of the user you are training).

I’ve gained a fair bit of experience in this field over the past few years, some of it good and some of it bad (sometimes the bad stuff has been really helpful to learn from), so in a similar vein to my IT Trainer post here is some of my tips for making a good installer. Continue reading »