Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

Status
Not open for further replies.
JoeMorgue said:
Sounds cards really do seem to have died as a mainstream PC component. Back in the 90s/2000s your sound card was as big of a part of your computer build as your graphics card was, especially in gaming.

But I guess since "multimedia" stopped being a thing some computers did and became something all computers were just default expected to do that's no longer the case.
Click to expand...

Economics - sound processors for what the mass market wants are as cheap as chips so once one motherboard manufacturer started offering the option of a "sound card" being built in at hardly any increase in price it became the default.

Many are the hours I lost trying to get sound cards and a video card and a network card to work in the same blasted IBM clone PC.... the word "interrupts" can still bring me out in a cold sweat!
 
theprestige said:
Some people find it funnier to not belabor the obvious. Just putting it out there was more than enough to sell the joke, in my opinion.
Click to expand...

Big packages rarely achieve subtlety. Just ask that student teacher in my freshman phys ed class. The regular teacher had to take him aside to explain that gentlemen can't wear boxer shorts under sweat pants, and that's what the class was laughing about. And in some cases, falling in love.
 
TragicMonkey said:
It's probably in there but not officially installed in Device Manager, and since mere peons using the laptop aren't allowed admin rights I can't do that myself.
Click to expand...
If you can't 'acquire' local admin rights then are you up to the job?
 
Darat said:
Economics - sound processors for what the mass market wants are as cheap as chips so once one motherboard manufacturer started offering the option of a "sound card" being built in at hardly any increase in price it became the default.

Many are the hours I lost trying to get sound cards and a video card and a network card to work in the same blasted IBM clone PC.... the word "interrupts" can still bring me out in a cold sweat!
Click to expand...
IRQ5
 
I just had to transfer a call to my TL because the caller was the most important person in the department and flatly refused to do any of the things I was suggesting she do.

Outlook won't work
We'll do a profile reset
That was done last week
Office repair then. You'll need to bring the laptop back to the office and dock it
Nope. Not going to do that.
Can you use RAS?
Nope. Not going to do that. RAS is unreliable.
Since the lockdown we've massively increased our RAS capacity and now have hundreds of people using it every day.
Nope, not going to.
It's going to be very difficult to fix your computer unless you can bring it in.
Nope. We're getting nowhere. I want to speak to someone else.
Gladly!
 
Technical question -- if a laptop doesn't have a sound card, can it make any sounds at all? Or is a sound card more of a gaming thing, configurable and all that?
 
I may have said this before, but I'm really liking Microsoft Teams. My organisation is really leaning into it, and we're very much developing its features into things that we can really use on a day to day basis.

Say what you want about Microsoft, but I think Teams is a winner.
 
alfaniner said:
Technical question -- if a laptop doesn't have a sound card, can it make any sounds at all? Or is a sound card more of a gaming thing, configurable and all that?
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure mine has a sound card, or at least the sound-producing equivalent on the motherboard inside there, but the problem is at some point somebody must have uninstalled it through Windows Device Manager. If that's the case then it could be "found" again in Device Manager and re-enabled in about thirty seconds of work...but you have to have admin rights to run the "find device" business. And being a healthcare IT laptop it's locked down well tighter than I can overcome. Our helpdesk got outsourced to India so it would take a good hour or two on the phone to get any sort of help, and when it came it would be to dispatch someone in person at the office, where nobody will be until October.

It doesn't make any sounds at all, not a solitary beep. I think a previous owner might have uninstalled sound on the laptop to try to solve a horrific audio feedback problem everyone in my office has with our crappy monitors (why the hell would anyone buy monitors with speakers built in? That never works well) but that problem is with the monitors and not the laptops docked and connected to them. (Most of us, back in our actually present-in-the-office beforetimes, solved that issue by just plugging in headphones to the faulty monitors and then dropping the headphones behind the desks.)
 
arthwollipot said:
I may have said this before, but I'm really liking Microsoft Teams. My organisation is really leaning into it, and we're very much developing its features into things that we can really use on a day to day basis.

Say what you want about Microsoft, but I think Teams is a winner.
Click to expand...

Are you crazy? I can't figure out how to disable those damn popups so every time I get a message it pops on the screen AND flashes AND puts a stupid red number on the task bar. And if you're in multiple groups because god forbid every stupid bastard in the place doesn't add you to every damn group you get little red numbers that show up until you switch around to every group and THEN find something it thinks you haven't read. AND if you leave it on the chat screen you HAVE to be in one of the old chats, so it looks like the conversation is still ongoing. I have to start a new chat every damn day just so I'm not hovering in an old conversation.

Teams is endlessly self-importantly screaming for attention, and that is the worst. If I wanted communcation I can't ignore I'd be at the damn office.

eta: and if you close the damn thing to get away it ******* EMAILS you to tell you somebody said something...but it won't say what it was. You have to open up Teams to find out.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Are you crazy? I can't figure out how to disable those damn popups so every time I get a message it pops on the screen AND flashes AND puts a stupid red number on the task bar. And if you're in multiple groups because god forbid every stupid bastard in the place doesn't add you to every damn group you get little red numbers that show up until you switch around to every group and THEN find something it thinks you haven't read. AND if you leave it on the chat screen you HAVE to be in one of the old chats, so it looks like the conversation is still ongoing. I have to start a new chat every damn day just so I'm not hovering in an old conversation.

Teams is endlessly self-importantly screaming for attention, and that is the worst. If I wanted communcation I can't ignore I'd be at the damn office.

eta: and if you close the damn thing to get away it ******* EMAILS you to tell you somebody said something...but it won't say what it was. You have to open up Teams to find out.
Click to expand...
I'd like to be able to receive popup notifications without the annoying bong sound, but otherwise it's working really well for us, particularly since it was implemented in a rush at the beginning of the lockdown.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Are you crazy? I can't figure out how to disable those damn popups so every time I get a message it pops on the screen AND flashes AND puts a stupid red number on the task bar.
Click to expand...


I'm not even using it and there was some annoying popup on two of my systems every time I booted up. I didn't want to waste time figuring out how to stop that, so I just uninstalled Teams.
 
I rather like Slack apart from 2 features. You can't add someone to a DM session which can be annoying, only permanant channels allow that. And you can't swap fonts. When you're swapping medical ICD-10 and Read codes like E28z. that's a pain.
But it's good for chats, you can pick "critical" channels you get alerts for, we've added channels that critical processes can post to ("Critical error in ..... job ending") with 1 line of shell script.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top Bottom