Monday, December 11, 2006

Barney could not print of a shared printer i.e Heathers HP laserjet 3150 which is configured for him to use. It prompted that the server could not verify the machine. On looking at the properties of the configured printer I managed to notice that Heather's machine was identified using her IP Address. That was the problem because though all the machines within the company have static IP Address fished out by the DHCP server but still every time the machine reboots the IP Address changes. Heather's machine had a different IP Address now and thats the reason Barney couldn't print of her machine.
I deleted the set printer and configured it again using Heather's computer name file://// Laserjet instead of file:////100.1.1.197/Heathers. In this case even if her system is rebooted and IP address changes the computer name would not.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Steve Owles complained about his dell laptop D520 battery that it does not hold any charge anymore. It only runs with power supply connected to it. I had to run the diagnostic tool installed by dell on the hard drive. That did not pick up any problem with the health of battery.
Then I thought of using his battery onto another dell D520 just to see if it works well on another machine. Tried and it worked and eventually worked on Steve's laptop aswell (STRANGE).

I had build a new Laptop for Barney. While hand him over his machine he told me that since last couple of days his machine's been prompting that his password going to expire very soon and change it. So I changed his password onto his present laptop and shut it down and gave him away his new laptop. The job was not finished. He logged acall soon after that he couldn't log in using his new password.
So I had to go through it and found that he has been using wireless and hence his machine been using the cached password and not allowing him to use the new one. I put him onto LAN and asked him to log in. It worked for him.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Nigel Garrett could not archive some of his old e-mails on outlook 2003 for some reason. When he decided to archive all the emails before a particular date like 28/05/06 it meant all the emails before that date should have gone into a archive folder onto a network drive specified by him. There were a couple of odd emails which did not seem to getting archived and remained in his inbox.
I went through all his standard settings in first place and when nothing seemed to be working patched his ofiice professional 2003. the problem still did not resolve. Then on refering to some articles over microsoft technet I manged to find the way archive worked in outloook 2003. it explained that archiving doesn't only take into consideration the date email was sent ( that is what all of us see on last column of the outlook) but also the modified date (open the email and check under properties). On looking at the emails which were not getting archived on Nigel's machine the modification dates were different from the sent dates.
The only way to arcvive these emails was to drag and drop them.

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Got to install VPN for Barney. As soon as The client software was installed the System showed a blue screen and shut down. I shut down the system and reboot it in the safe mode and then pick the last best configuration. This let me get the system back to position without VPN installed on it. On refering with Alan I was supposed to try installing the VPN in safe mode using networking. The system tends to use the minimum drivers required in the the safe mode. Installed and logged back in as the administrator. The problem still persisted. The last option was to back up the hard drive and format it. Now installed the VPN first of all and configured the rest of the machine. IT WORKED.
Heather logged a call that her desktop toolbar disapeared all of a sudden. On having a look for "toolbar disapeared in windows XP" in google I managed to find that the registery has been corrupted by some kind of malware or adware. Using tweaks I had to edit the registery of the operating system and rectify the problem.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

I was supposed to change the CD ROM with a DVD Combo on Dell Dimension 4100. It was not that staright away as I thought it to be. After opening the chasis of the machine I could not manage to get the ROM out until I reffered to manual available online under technical support.
Even after that it was real pain in the neck replacing that but somehow I managed and afterwards tested if it was working alright.
Barney had asked for access to a new Konica Minolta Bizhub C250 printer and also the one locally attached to Heather's desktop.
I had to get the configuration of the printer first and find out the IP address. After running the add printer wizard and configuring it using the drivers which came on the cd along with the printer it did not print the test page and showed an error: printer page error 8.5x11''. In first instance I could not figure out the problem since I never came across such a thing. On refering some online forums and manuals I could figure out that probabaly the printer was by default set to American standards and needed to be changed accordingly. After right clicking on the icon for the printer and selecting the page preferences I managed to make A4 the default page setting which resolved the problem.
Now I was supposed to configure laptop for printer attached to Heather's desktop. This time as well after going through whole of the wizard nothing seemed to be working and I had to again do a bit of reading. I found from articles that it would not work until the machine which the printer is attached to is sharing the printer and will only allow to print when the local machine is in ON state. I found that the machine was shut down which explains the reasons.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Gerry called that he could not map a network drive to his virtual PC. On going listening to him and following the errors I had to join his virtual machine to workplace domain which now allowed him to map the required drives.
Later he could not install any software to his virtual PC. On going through few articles I managed to find out that he needs to log in as an administrator before trying to install any piece of software. On doing so he was able to install oracle.

Monday, November 06, 2006

Ulrik could not manage to work offline on his outlook 2003. As a company standard we always configure it to allow users to work offline from home or locations where they can not find internet conncetion. I logged into his machine and initially worked online on outlook. Under toools>E-mail Accounts>select View or change existing email accounts>change>more settings>tick use cached exchange mode. Then closed the browser window opened it again and this time selected work offline. It did not show any error message and worked fine.

Alan provided me with the URL and ID password for our Cisco Virtual Private Network and trained me on how to configure it.I looged into the machine and did it individually afterwards and familiarised with it.

Gerry needed a Virtual PC 2004 installed on his HP desktop with Windows XP SP2 on it. I took the MSDN disk along and put it into his CD drive. It did not seem to pick up the CD. I noticed that MSDN disk was a DVD and Gerry desktop only had a CD R\W. I had to put the DVD into my machine and share it with Gerry. I installed the Virtual PC successfully. Now I had to put Windows XP as Virtual Machine. The problem being that I only had the MSDN disk for XP I had to again pull across network from my machine. Unfortunately that did not seem to work this time around since what happens is that when we run Virtual PC console it asks for the boot disk not allowing to select any network source. So I had no other option than to create a windows XP cd.

Friday, November 03, 2006

Yesterday till evening I could not manage to add Quinn as administrator of his laptop probably because the active directory sysnchronises with the domain controller overnight. I managed to sort that out in the morning.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

It was a busy day as expected since I have been on a holiday. I had a new starter Mr. Quinn who required a new laptop so started the day with configuring a laptop for him. Ian Baxter wanted me to put the internet kiosk in place at reception. He had been facing password problem with his laptop as well. Everytime he launched his outlook 2003 it would prompt him for changing his password and even if he changes it nothing seems to be working out. I logged into his machine as an administrator of the local account and changed his password. Then asked him to log in and check if he was still facing that problem. Everything seemed alright to him and he was satisfied.
James Hollywood one of the software support guy logged a call that text in his outlook inbox would sometimes appear very big and makes it difficult for him to work. After asking him a couple of question he did not seem to be catching up well and I eventually had to log remotely onto his machine. I found that he had three different versions of outlook. All he needed was one good configuration of outlook onto his hard drive. I popped in a Microsoft Office 2003 CD into my drive and shared with him. Then using VNC installed office onto his machine from my drive.

Barney Quinn's laptop had one keyboard key missing so ended up replacing his keyboard aswell.

Friday, October 27, 2006



The developers had ordered memory upgrades to 2GB for D810 and D505 Dell Latitude laptops. I had to replace the present memory on laptops with the new ones. After going the instruction manual I made an attempt to change them. While replacing D810 I couldnt find the second PCI slot at the back of the machine though D505 had two slots at the back and I replaced the memories. On refering to the dell support site I found that second slot for D810 was under the keyboard so I had to remove the keyboard of the laptop to replace the second memory. After upgrading the memory I had to go into the system setup from PXE mode and confirmed that the memories were upgraded correctly.

Installed Windows Vista onto one of the machines and started testing its features. Used some of its features which did not seem to be working right.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Jayesh, Software Support Analyst needed Cisco's VPN as well Check Point on his system. Actually our company's standard virtual private network solution is Cisco's so he had it on his machine already while supporting Metro he had to have Check Point which is their standard he needed in order to support them.He logged a call that he was facing problems downloading Check Point and everytime he tried to the system would just stop responding.
I and Alan spent quite a lot of time troubleshooting it and atlast managed to configure it right by removing Cisco from his machine and downloading Check Point and then putting VPN onto it. It all worked well this way.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Got a Dell Form Factor from server room for building latest version of Vista. Set it all up on my desk and used a laptop to burn the downloaded version of Vista. I had to first backup the hard drive of the form factor onto mkhqfile server using acronis true image software. After backing it up started booting off the Vista CD to rash the hard drive. System failed to boot off the CD. It was absolutely weird. At first it appeared to be problem with the CD drive. Diagnosed it and came across the fact that it was just CD-ROM and Vista one was a DVD.
Ulrik Loretzen had problems with applying an office 2003 application called Remove Hidden File Tool which verifies the hidden component in a office document and allows the user to remove them. He installed the software from the microsoft website but could not run it. I had to go through the process of downloading it onto my my machine and troubeshooting how to use it. Went through microsoft and some other independent articles on how to implement it. Cracked it and sent him an email since he had left for a business trip abroad.

Monday, October 23, 2006

On friday Craig had logged a call that he was facing some problem with his laptop keypad. The keys did not write what they were supposed to. To diagnose it I had to reboot the laptop and go to preinstallation mode by pressing F2 and then run the diagnostics.
It came up with the error in keypad. I logged a call with Dell and talked through the problem. Just to make sure the guy asked me to run the diagnostics CD which comes with the dell laptops. Went through that and confirmed the problem. A new keypad was confirmed to be shipped. I have recieved it today but Craig's outside the office for today.

Nigel Garrett, Sales Director needed a memory upgrade on his machine. I called him to find out his present configuration. Asked him to scan his machine buy going to site http://www.crucial.com/uk/ and following the appropriate steps. But he could not complete the scan since it required some additional hardware information. I took the control of his machine and tried to figure it out. I did manage to find the specs and the possible upgrade. Now the problem was that I required the DIMM for his RAM which was not showing up anywhere. I tried system configuratio tool and even tried to find from preinstallation mode but it was not mentioned anywhere. The last option I was left with was to send someone to physically open his box and find the DIMM spec. At last I had it and then created a purchase order and forwarded to Nigel. He got it signed and forwarded it to me. All that I was left with was order it online from crucial memory using the company credit card.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Over the last couple days I have been studying about various concepts. Alan's been sharing his experiences with me IP Addressing, Internet Security, LAN, VLAN, network management tools,hacking, antispyware, switches,hubs and routers.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Started with resolving problems on the intranet site which based on Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. Dave came in the problem that he could not copy anything of the cd onto his hard drive. Went through all possiblities and found that he had two user accounts as himself for administrator of the local machine. Logged him out and logged in as an administrator of the local machine. tried to read of the cd and it worked........

Friday, October 13, 2006

Installed XP onto the new hard drive using acronis 9.0. started with the testing of the Microsoft Technical Demonstration Toolkit. It took ages since it did not have the recommended ram on it i.e 2GB.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

As we are Microsoft Certified partner we recieved Technical Demonstration Toolkit which includes 66 of the famous applications for demonstration purposes to our clients of what we can provide. We were looking to test it before hand. We had this spare Dell D505 laptop with the image of Stuart's server 2003. The first thing to do was restore Windows XP onto the machine using Acronis which would save time. While doing that I could notice some kind of noise from the machine. After restoring it asked for a reboot. I tried to reboot and it failed. I ran the diagnostics and found that the hard drive had crashed. Logged a call with Dell and orderd a new hard drive. Got an old dell laptop from the warehouse and replaced the memory. Used Acronis again and restored XP onto it. But this old laptop had only 20GB of memory which did not solve the purpose so used an external 150GB memory. Started installing the Microsoft Demonstration Toolkit Applications on the external memory. It was expected to take it more than an hour so called it a day.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Recovered Stuart's system by booting from the acronis true image server 9.1 CD.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

CRM server was live and I had to back it up. The problem was that when I installed Acronis True Image Server 9.1 it required a reebot. I was not sure what to do so Alan helped me with it.
We went through all the running\started applications on the server and configured to manually from automatic control. Backed the server across the network onto mkhqfile server in workplace domain.
The new test version for Windows Vista is out now so spent some time reading about the pathes and features of Vista.

Monday, October 09, 2006

Started with trying to backup Windows server 2003 across the network onto mkhqfile server with aid of Acronic Version 8........unsuccessful. Alan always knew it would not work. He wanted me show the restrictions and shortcomings. He forwarded me the mail containing the downloadable version of Acronis True Image server 9.1 along with the key. He taught me the basics that why do we need a different version for backing up servers. I had to create a CD and a bootable CD unlike a version 9 one which was bootable. I learnt what makes a CD bootable and how to write them. we did all the tests and now intend to backup the mkhqfile server once its been updated by Steve with Microsoft CRM databases.

Friday, October 06, 2006

Yesterday I had managed to finish with the Internet Kiosk project by locking down all the chrome icons of the browser and providing the user with only forward and back navigation icons.
The only way to come out of the kiosk mode is to press ctrl+alt+del and bring up the task manager and cancel the running application.
Today I have been testing Acronis True Image Version9 for cloning machines. I used it to backup an image of Windows XP Pro onto the file server across the network and then used the Acronis cd to boot up the system and restore. The next plan of action would be to blast the system with Windows server 2003 and use Acronis version 8 to clone.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

I straight away started editing the registery by following the instructions I found on the internet. I managed to lock down most of the icons and features of Internet Explorer. It would not allow the user to browse the internet since I removed the address bar and locked all the tool icons which were not required. I enabled the system to autorun the internet explorer and disallowed the used to use chrome feature of close.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Spent the whole day configuring the Internet Kiosk Pro to work as required. There were a few concerns like some of the links on our website did not open. All the documents were in .pdf format which coul not be accessed when computer in kiosk mode hence I gad to test all the fields and diagnose the shortcomings and resolve them. Did manage to get evrything right afterall.
But then happened as I expected Ian(Director) said it was too sophesticated and he wanted it to be as simple as possible. He intended not to provide the keyboard to the user. Allan was there aswell and advised to use registery hacking. I did not even have a clue what he talked about. I followed his instructions to find how to make changes in the registery of a Windows XP.

Monday, October 02, 2006

On friday Alan asigned me a task to create a system for training and marketing purpose which would be placed in the reception and allow visitors to surf only our website. They would not be allowed to do anything else at all.
I began with finding it on the internet and came across many options of which one was very simple and straight forward and asked to edit the registry of internet explorer.
Now since I could not take the risk of changing the registry of my computer I had to build another PC and try on that.
Today PC was all ready and I tried to implement registery editing but unfortunately that did not work. I had to look at other options and came across this piece of software called Internet Kiosk Pro which costs a bit of money but was available for trial. Downloaded it and configured that but that did not seem to be working either.

Thursday, September 28, 2006

I have installed the Dell PowerEdge 2900 server today. Had to follow all the documentation to install Microsoft Windows server 2003 R2 and patch it and then install bunch of highly sophesticated management consoles. It was a good learning lesson because server has different hardware configuration and needs different approach as compared to a PC. Got to learn how RAID is configured and how consoles are used to remotely manage servers just to name a few.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Paul came with his toshiba laptop which failed to boot. He had all his work on that machine which we were supposed to recover for him. Now if the machine does not boot how to recover the files of it......PROBLEM......Alan had today only bought in this smart piece of software called ERD Commander 2005 which was capable of doing this stuff. But I must say more than just having this software some experience and expertise was required. Alan managed to do it and showed me as well. Afterwards I went through all the features of the ERD.
We recieved the Dell PowerEdge 2900 Server today. I went through all the documentation that came along with it.
On tusday I learnt about Microsoft Windows Server 2003. I insttaled it onto my desktop and patched it.
Went through its security settings and features. Worked for a while on Dreamweaver and went through some tutorials and features of it.

Monday, September 25, 2006

Extensively learnt how to select TFT monitors, their specs, prices and different brands. Installed Visual Studio and SQL server on PC. We had a new started today in development. Talked him through his Dell D520 laptop with all the specs and company standards that we follow.

Friday, September 22, 2006

Learnt about history and infrastructure of networking (routers, switches and hubs). Their different types and configurations. Alan gave me a book, Cisco Begginer’s Guide to read.
Installed Microsoft Frontpage 2003 on my PC and went through a tutorial on how to make a website.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Week starting 14.08.06

I was shown all the departments and introduced to the colleagues. Alan briefed me about the job description and what he expected of me. He straight away started explaining about the hardware configuration of a desktop. I learnt about most of the hardware in the box and their specifications. The unit he opened to explain me was ancient but he did it just to give me an overview of what is it like. I also had the opportunity to see the server and Alan taught me the difference between a server and a computer. He went through all the technical aspects of it which I reckon will definitely help me in some point of time.

Then I started with configuring my first computer which was a Dell desktop for one of the new starters. Alan showed what all to do and how. He explained everything precisely with emphasis on what is the need of it, how important it is and what difference does it make.

In the last couple of days of the week I had the opportunity to assist Zak who is a Consultant and was working on a project for KFC at their Hounslow outlet. We had to monitor with the help of PDA’s the operation of Hand Held Tills being used by them during busy hours and later on provide them with the detailed analysis and presentation of the same.

In whole my first week at placement went really well and wasn’t bad at all to start with.



Week starting 21.08.06

I got to configure dell laptops for Andrew and Gary who were supposed to start next week.
The dell laptops come with windows XP professional installed on them. Alan explained how to configure for a particular user and what all needs to be installed in general.
He even explained to me in detail about IP Address and OSI Layer and gave me Windows Server 2003 book to through.

He explained the importance of system backup and how to use system recovery techniques.
We tried ASR (Automated System Recovery) which is featured in Windows XP Pro and found that it doesn’t help without the floppy drives.
Then we tried to do the same using Norton Ghost 9.0 which helps create backup on the network. We created the image of one of the new laptops and later booted of the Norton cd and restored using the image on the network.

Later part of the week was spent assisting Zak at KFC.



Week starting 28.08.06

Alan had already installed a beta version of vista on the laptop. We went through the features of vista and tried to create backup using vista. Vista allowed to create the backup image on the DVD. We found that vista compressed the data before creating the image onto the DVD. We booted the system of the DVD and it all worked well.

Then I had to see one of the consultants who wanted office 2003 on his laptop and his wireless was not working either. He had an old Compaq laptop which did not come with wireless so he had a Netguard wireless card which wasn’t working. I checked that he had the driver installed but it still wasn’t working. All I could think of was uninstall the driver and install again. I went for it but still it didn’t work. I had to ask Alan and he installed the latest driver from Netguard website and it all started working then.

I had to assist Zak again on Thursday and Friday.


Week starting 04.09.06

Monday
Zak needed a laptop so I configured it up for him. I had to install Windows XP onto one the laptops which had vista for him.
Installation went alright until I found that network connection wasn’t there hence I couldn’t patch the machine. As per rule I looked for the network driver by running the drivers CD and found that it was there. Steve came to the rescue and asked me to still extract the driver files and download.
Then I had to put Anju’s desktop PC ready on her desk . The problem this time was again of the network. I connected the Ethernet cable but the connection wasn’t there. I looked at all the available options but couldn’t get it working.

Tuesday
In the morning the first thing I did was fixing her LAN up. Actually I dint have a clue that I have to activate her network line physically from the network hub which is there in our server room until Steve showed me how to do.
Later in the day Anju had a problem logging in so we had to change her password. Then she had a problem with sending/receiving e-mails. Everytime she had to click send/receive to send or receive e-mail which shouldn’t be like that. On finding out she was offline and wasn’t connected to the mkexchange server. I had to go through the internet to find out what could be the problem because Alan wasn’t there and Steve had some important stuff to do. Eventually I managed to fix it up.

Wednesday
I learnt about the hardware specification of the Dell Optiplex GX520 desktop. Alan showed me all the hardware components inside the box and explained. We discussed about the history of computers and about the companies which are present today. We searched on the internet about different hardware components and their costs. Alan discussed how to build a PC according to the needs of the client. He even taught me about motherboards and and what all they comprise of.

Thursday
We had the job of providing BBC with four HP laptops having same stuff. Mark had prepared one of them which took him a day. All we had to do was create the image of that and restore onto other three. We used Norton Ghost 8.0 to create the image across the network but couldn’t restore it to HP laptops. The Norton restoration CD actually did not have the Network driver of HP. So we copied the contents of the built HP laptop onto an external hard drive. This did not work because HP took the external hard drive as the C drive of the system. Then we tried to extract the HP network driver from its website and copied it onto a USB floppy drive. But HP didn’t understand that either.
Eventually we found that the HP laptop had its own Backup and restoration software installed onto the system so we used that to create the image of the built up laptop and restore it on the new laptops.
In between I even mapped the administration drive of MKFILE for Trish.

Friday

Week Starting 11.09.06

Monday
Built Alan’s laptop for Ulrick Lorentzen. I used Norton ghost to restore the image of Steve Hodson’s laptop across the network on mk_prod\uranus onto Ulrick’s laptop. Then generically changed the computer name and added Ulrick to the domain and created an account for him. Configured Microsoft Office 2003 for him and his outlook.

Tuesday
Created ISO file of Microsoft Office 2003 burnt it onto a DVD installed it onto a laptop. Used Norton ghost to backup laptop across the network on Uranus \ mk_prod then booted the system of the CD just to verify if it works.
Alan told me that it is possible to retrieve data of the formatted hard drive using software tools like Disk Commander and ERD Commander which was quite shocking to me just because I never knew about anything of that sort.
He got Disk Commander and was about to talk through it but unfortunately it did not work because the laptop we tried it on was the latest dell one and the software was old so it did not support.
Then installed Office beta version 2007 onto my desktop and familiarised with it.

Wednesday
We had Ulrick’s name spelling wrong in first place so we had to change it everywhere to ULRIK.
All we had to do was rectify his name on active directory then change his computer name and registry using regedit. His mail mail account required changing so had to delete his present account and recreate it.
Then I had the task of cloning Myles Rose’s laptop on a external USB hard drive. I logged in as administrator and installed Norton ghost onto his machine. Activated it using the serial key and rebooted.

Thursday
Built a Dell520 laptop for new starter. Ulrik wanted to print off some color pages so had to set up a color printer for him. The printer didn’t print a test page so had to trobleshoot it.
Had to browse through Oki website to find the driver for C7200 printer and extract that file while going through the printer installation wizard.




Friday
Alan took me down the road to Tiscali’s data centre for a quick check of the servers. He showed and explained to me about them. Later I built a couple of laptop’s for Andrew and Megan.

Week Starting 18.09.06

Monday
Built a new dell D520 laptop for Andy Bell according to his requirements. Andrew Lookes saw a blue screen of death on his D505 so had to diagnose using a dell diagnostic CD. Booted off the cd and ran the diagnostic tool. Just went through all of the hardware and eventually came acroos a error on the hard drive with displaying message

Error Code 0F00:0244
Msg:Block 6518005:Uncorrectable data error or media is write protected

Contact dell technical support centre with the above details for complete diagnosis.

Tuesday
We had a western digital external hard drive which we used for cloning purposes. It did not respond in the way that it showed unallocated space on it. We were a bit concerned because it had important images on it which we might require. We tried to figure out the problem. We managed to know that the hard drive was working fine it was just that we have lost all the data stored on it. You can say it probably got erased or deleted. So we tried a software product called Easy Recovery Professional from a website ontrack.co.uk but it only allowed to recover a read only mode and did not actually retrieve it.
Then I learnt from Alan about the Virtual PC’s and virtual applications and practically installed Vista within XP.

Wednesday
I leaned about company’s Active Directory and how it all worked. Alan even taught me the different ways in which active directory can work and how important it is to build a right one. I learnt about Terminal Servers as well. I later reinstalled Windows XP Professional onto Matthew’s Dell D810 laptop and patched it.
Then we had to spec a new server for imaging purposes. We only do dell’s so it was like we went to their website. Alan talked through how to decide the spec and what all technologies are available at the moment. Everything seemed quite interesting and was an excellent learning edge.

Thursday
Alan was sick and decided to work from home. I investigated for a way to present my work impressively. I could find the option like having a blog or my own website. I started surfing the net for how to create and manage them. I came through quite a lot of options. I think it will take me a while to decide.
I have found this very interesting way of putting my work online by using a blog. It will probably help me maintaining my diary. The only problem is that it doesnt allow me to back date anything and hence all the entries will come up on present date.