Well the fire imspector for our company retired, and the new guy was very young, and wanted to prove he was better than the old guy. He came in a decided that Power strips plugged into extension cords that led to the UPS were unsafe, and gave us three weeks to replace them.

A few weeks ago our email server started glitching up. People would try and send email, only for the receiving domain to reject it because it 'does not contain a PTR record'.

After much frustration and a couple of weeks later, we found that it was not, as reported by the email clients (Thunderbird/Outlook) a PTR record error, but rather an A record was missing.

In my workplace we have a program used to maintain data, which I shall call Program A. It relies on .Net 3. However, there is a Program B that acts as a patch, and this runs off .Net 3.5.

This little pilot fish gets the request from his supervisor to fix this program on a computer, which shouldn't take long. So I do the following.

Our organisation uses a major company's piece of software to maintain client records.

I ran the installer, and it installs quite smoothly. Until an error comes up.

Now, one would think that referencing the error number would give the solution, right? Well, this is what the error message was.

"Installation ended prematurely because of an error."

Users will never understand security is necessary. To them it is only a roadblock to progress.

Enter laptop user, we'll call her Miss X. Miss X puts in a call to the helpdesk-- "High Priority" : unable to log in to laptop!. Help desk knows her password and instructs her to make sure caps lock is off etc.

I currently work as a pre-sales tech for network equipment. After dealing with several frustrating customer requests, I decide to get some air. I meet up with a coworker and begin venting.

Computerworld recently published a review of 10 operating systems time has left behind. From AmigaOS to BeOS to OS/2, they are gone but not forgotten. Some of them were actually quite good; others had annoying, but possibly endearing, quirks; still others may've made you want to put your computer through a wall. What are some of your, if not favorite, then most memorable operating systems of the past?

Let’s go back to 1994, just after the first Pentiums were out; When Microsoft was just starting to jump from the desktop into the networking world with NT 4.0. The hottest video card I remember was the Diamond Viper and SVGA was just starting into existence. Cell phones where big as bricks and everyone was on dial-up for a home internet connection.

I am submitting my first bait so be gentle please.

A user group in our organization has been straying outside of the security requirements that I authored by using a PC in their area as a central workstation.

Not really IT related, but the recent stories about power-failures reminded me of one my dad told me.