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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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........

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.

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.

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

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.

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.