Wednesday, January 06, 2010
"Three Hours"
I had hi hopes for today, which admittedly is not yet over. I was around 9am or so (after a really wierd dream no less) and had to whole day almost laid out. I checked some various sites I check in the morning and had breakfast then I found a question I thought I could answer on that question/answer site I sort of work for.
The question was about enabling the Wake-on-LAN feature of a computer. Which made me question what possible use the user had for such a relatively obscure feature. Seems he wanted to make his computer come on so he could access it remotely from Australia in a few weeks.
Well it took probably two hours just to describe to him how to get into the actual BIOS setup utility (he didn't know what a BIOS was). I was smart enough I asked him to use a separate computer from the one we would be rebooting to get into the BIOS.
What I didn't think of until all that time later when he finally was in the BIOS was that there is always the possiblity some old clunky eMachine wasn't going to actually HAVE wake-on-lan as an option period. This we soon found out after exploring the different options.
So I had the user reboot the emachine and look at the properties of the NIC in Windows to see if the WOL feature could be enabled there. But there didn't seem to be any option.
Keep in mind by the point it had been literally THREE HOURS. I hadn't even gotten up. The user always responded right away. At least he had commitment, which is more than I can say for some certain customers.
I told the user the option was not available but since you want the thing to wake up for accessing it you could schedule a task and tell it to "wake up for this task". I did this as kind of a throw away comment like sorry I couldn't help research this... sort of thing. But of course the user asked me how to set up a task to do that. So I had to go and write up a quick step-by-step for setting up a dummy task along with the instruction wake the PC up.
I then told the customer I had been sitting for three hours and that the question needed to either end and he accept my information or that I would like to request a break of a couple hours.
So the user accepted. Which was a relief if for no other reason because I'd been doing the same thing for so long and I thought I had other things to do. But unfortunately it was only a $10 questoin. Of course the web site takes their cut so it came to $2.60. Yes, you read right: THREE HOURS OF EFFORT FOR A GRAND TOTAL OF $2.60. Well, that is sure worth it, isn't it? I did get a little blog post out of it. So there's that.
I'll probably right more. I'm going to get something to eat.
¶ 2:57 PM I had hi hopes for today, which admittedly is not yet over. I was around 9am or so (after a really wierd dream no less) and had to whole day almost laid out. I checked some various sites I check in the morning and had breakfast then I found a question I thought I could answer on that question/answer site I sort of work for.
The question was about enabling the Wake-on-LAN feature of a computer. Which made me question what possible use the user had for such a relatively obscure feature. Seems he wanted to make his computer come on so he could access it remotely from Australia in a few weeks.
Well it took probably two hours just to describe to him how to get into the actual BIOS setup utility (he didn't know what a BIOS was). I was smart enough I asked him to use a separate computer from the one we would be rebooting to get into the BIOS.
What I didn't think of until all that time later when he finally was in the BIOS was that there is always the possiblity some old clunky eMachine wasn't going to actually HAVE wake-on-lan as an option period. This we soon found out after exploring the different options.
So I had the user reboot the emachine and look at the properties of the NIC in Windows to see if the WOL feature could be enabled there. But there didn't seem to be any option.
Keep in mind by the point it had been literally THREE HOURS. I hadn't even gotten up. The user always responded right away. At least he had commitment, which is more than I can say for some certain customers.
I told the user the option was not available but since you want the thing to wake up for accessing it you could schedule a task and tell it to "wake up for this task". I did this as kind of a throw away comment like sorry I couldn't help research this... sort of thing. But of course the user asked me how to set up a task to do that. So I had to go and write up a quick step-by-step for setting up a dummy task along with the instruction wake the PC up.
I then told the customer I had been sitting for three hours and that the question needed to either end and he accept my information or that I would like to request a break of a couple hours.
So the user accepted. Which was a relief if for no other reason because I'd been doing the same thing for so long and I thought I had other things to do. But unfortunately it was only a $10 questoin. Of course the web site takes their cut so it came to $2.60. Yes, you read right: THREE HOURS OF EFFORT FOR A GRAND TOTAL OF $2.60. Well, that is sure worth it, isn't it? I did get a little blog post out of it. So there's that.
I'll probably right more. I'm going to get something to eat.
