Shame on you computer store !...

Today I had to fix a personnal computer : HP slimline :

According to the user, it is so slow that his son never used it well... prefering his father laptop !..even to watch pictures.

I first reinstalled the computer from scratch with standard VISTA ; in other words, no additionnal crapware (*). Then I installed Avast and MS Office 2003.

But, despite 2 Gb of memory, MS Vista performance reported 1/5 !!

I discovered the graphic card is the bottom neck : only 64M of memory when a laptop today is running an integrated 256 MB...

I do not blame HP, as when using it with MS Office it runs ok. However, everybody knows tday that a family computer will be used for games...

Don't you think that the vendor should have warn the end user ?

(*) all software installed by computer makers - supposed free- that in fact slow down the computer. Typically here the full last version of Norton.... that end user never paid for updates so probably infected his computer...

Of the good usage of support contract... from the Provider !

Today has started as a black Tuesday. As I entered the office 'Hey we have no more mails and can't connect ! Can you have a look ?' - says my boss.

The main Exchange server is down : powered off ! After restarting , I check all loags and (thanks to Nagios tracelog) I can see the outage time : 22:04 (10 PM) so it is not a human intervention in Paris. I so check with HQ in another European country : no they did noting even as test... So I check MSWindows event viewer : not any clear info. Pressed by management , I decide to leave it running.. for three hours !

@ 12:30 - lunch time !! key time in France ;-) - another crash ! I decide then to call HP with our support contract ! And then bingo : less than 1 minute to have ticket open, less than 10 minute for a call back of a technician !! He decided to ask me only two things , without going back to the begining and then decide to ship us new power parts !!! The contract was a four hours supports, but only 1:45 hours parts are in our office. Only 15 minutes to change them. And powered back the server is now live !!

Conclusion : it is a good think to have a support contract ! It is better to have a good provider linked to it. Thanks HP France!