If HP made R2-D2

http://abstrusegoose.com/a/213.htm

Enjoy.

Testing

If there was one thing I could rely on in my last school, it was that no problem was ever down to the infrastructure cabling.

The school’s network cabling had been done in house for years before I started there, and it was there that Bond taught me the fine art of Cat5e. I don’t remember us ever having an infrastructure cabling problem, except for the time it was chewed through by glis glis.

That meant that when I moved to my current school, I immediately decreed we would not be using contractors again any time soon, since I could take care of it and know I was doing a good job. This in turn led to me becoming intimately acquainted with several loft areas of the school over the summer, and more importantly, the purchase of my first Fluke Linkrunner kit. At nearly £600, it was an expensive purchase, but worth every penny; I view it as an essential for anyone who takes network cabling even half seriously. If you can’t trust the cabling, you can’t trust the network.

Which is why I have subsequently become infuriated by the fact that the contractors who previously installed network cabling at the school clearly did not have one.

In fact, they did not appear to have a testing tool of any kind. It turns out that I should have decreed that any of our previous cabling contractors who ever showed their faces again on site would be repeatedly stabbed in the eyes with an IDC punchdown tool. I’ve already had to re-terminate patch panels in two separate buildings after discovering that they hadn’t been terminated properly, a fault that not only demonstrates utter incompetence, but is also impossible to miss if you use even a basic continuity tester.

I am the Angry Technician. I am a professional, and take my job seriously. That is why when I install cabling, I GODDAMN TEST IT.

Dear Acer

Question: Who in their right mind would ship a server in this day and age that has EDB disabled by default, with no way to turn it on in the BIOS?

Answer: YOU WOULD, YOU DONKEYS.

This server is less than a year old. I should not have to install a BIOS update just so I can get Hyper-V working. Especially when said BIOS update takes far longer than it should and is extremely poorly documented.

Thanks to you I didn’t leave work until 23.15 last Friday. I inherited this server when I started my new job. Rest assured we will not be buying any more from you.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

Stubborn

In the last week I have reduced the number of printers in the school by six. That may not seem like much, but bear in mind that no-one has gone without as a result, and you begin to understand the reason why we have been spending so much on consumables. We have printers coming out of our ears.

All of these now-retired printers are HP. Which leaves me with a happy feeling inside.

What does not leave me with happy feeling inside is that every time I have gone to remove the various bits of HP software from the workstations, I have ended up having to resort to Autoruns, the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility, and hard file deletions to get rid of them after the uninstall programs largely failed to even run, let alone do anything remotely resembling an uninstall.

Did you know that the HP Deskjet D2460 software CD installs more than 20 component pieces of software, only 2 of which have functioning uninstallers, and most of which are completely hidden from Add/Remove Programs entirely? This is the sort of ridiculous obscenity you only truly learn about when you have to start digging through said obscenity in a titanic struggle to pry your computer from its slavering, undying jaws, the obsidian tendrils of its CLSIDs clinging desperately to the last remaining vestiges of its sundered registry keys.

Today I installed what I intend to be the first of many Xerox colour laser printers in the school. The driver download was a grand total of 2.6MB. By comparison, the smallest driver download for the D2460 is 36.0MB.

THIRTY-SIX MEGABYTES. For a DRIVER.

Guess which one of these printers works better?

Universal Speaker Mount

Need to mount some speakers above an Interative Whiteboard?

Not got any wall mounts?

Some pipes in the way, perhaps?

NO PROBLEM.

Spam

If you are a supplier touting for new business, may I suggest that adding my email address to your inane weekly mailout without asking me is a bad idea, especially if said weekly email is filled with special offers on HP products?

Legendary

From HP’s sales literature:

“The legendary quality and reliability of HP is built into the HP LaserJet Q5942 (42X) Print Cartridge, delivering professional print quality and excellent value to your business.”

Well. If by ‘legendary’, you mean:

leg·en·dar·y adj. of, constituting, based on, or of the nature of a-

leg·end n. an unverified story handed down from earlier times… a romanticized or popularized myth of modern times.

Then yes, HP’s quality is indeed legendary.

Dear Intel

If a RAID1 verify following a power failure takes 3 hours and utterly cripples the machine for the duration, to the point it is literally unusable, then using RAID is a waste of time. Even if there had been a drive problem, I could have replaced the drive and restored from a backup by now.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

Some things change, some things stay the same

I’ve been in my new job two days.

It’s a completely different type of school, in a different town.
The computer systems are very different.
The people are different.
The expectations are different.

However, I have already had to deal with two incidents of HP printers causing the Spooler service to fail on the computers they are connected to.

It turns out that some evils are so ingrained in our lives, we can never escape them.

The Case of the RESEND UPGRADE message

HP.

I don’t like them. If you’ve read more than five posts on this blog you may have noticed that already.

This is the tale of how I started down the long, dark, road of hatred towards HP, and why I think they are largely incompetent at what they do.

It started soon after I began my current job, and I first learned that you could perform BIOS upgrades on network printers by sending the upgrade over the network. Struck with the novelty of this, I naively decided it would be a good idea to make sure all of our network printers were up to date. The upgrades actually all went well. Apart from one.