Andy Fletcher » Computing http://www.tomcatuk.net Do, or do not, there is no try Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:05:27 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 It’s so tight, it won’t go in http://www.tomcatuk.net/its-so-tight-it-wont-go-in/ http://www.tomcatuk.net/its-so-tight-it-wont-go-in/#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 05:08:53 +0000 Andy http://www.tomcatuk.net/?p=261 Got another little job this afternoon fitting a new video card into a machine so it could run a two monitor display set up. Problem one…

Not sure the picture conveys the problem, but basically IBM (Lenovo really) have got the add in card retention mechanism in the form of a big steel plate to the right of the hole the expansion cards fit into. On this particular card, (made by Sapphire) the make has opted to put the VGA output as far to the right as possible. Result, it doesn’t really fit. That VGA cable is going to live under a constant pressure. I was still deciding who to blame for this, when as I installed the driver for the new video card I got this:

Listen very carefully if you write install routines for video drivers. Before we run your software, we’ve most likely removed any other video card drivers from the system. That means while we install your drivers, we’re looking at an 800×600 display. So PLEASE make your stuff fit within that.

While I’m ranting, why the hell are Sapphire showing me a bunch of advertisements during the install routine for games like Modern Warefare 2. This video card is NEVER going to be able to support that. And I’m not in the market to buy one – because I just bought one.

]]> http://www.tomcatuk.net/its-so-tight-it-wont-go-in/feed/ 0 Senseless waste of time http://www.tomcatuk.net/senseless-waste-of-time/ http://www.tomcatuk.net/senseless-waste-of-time/#comments Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:24:00 +0000 Andy http://www.tomcatuk.net/?p=26 So I get asked why one of the guys can’t view a flash demonstration he wants to look at on the web and please sort it out now.
Now, I don’t by default grant administrative rights to users. They don’t really need them and it stops them from installing all kinds of dangerous rubbish on their machines. This guy was set as a power user and for some reason MS Server & XP Pro doesn’t want Flash Player installed without admin rights. After 15 minutes of sodding about I give up and grant the user admin rights, and Flash is his to behold.
I tell him he should be good to go now, and out of interest what exactly was it (ie the URL of the page) that he was so interested in looking at…
Can you guess what happens next?
He doesn’t remember. He knows the keyphrase he gave Google to find it, but there are 74.6 trillion results and which one he was looking at is (after 15 mins) a distant memory. Now I could at that point showed him how to use his browser history (ie a fairly basic operation with any web browser I would have thought) but he seemed to have lost interest in the whole idea at that point. I certainly had.
Anyhows, now he has admin priviledges, so the scope for cocking things up on the network multiplies about 20 fold. Looking forward to tomorrow! With a bit of luck someone will ask me how to find file>print. I’m not joking.

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