I GOT THE JOB!
\o/ !Wo0oT! \o/
<.< o.O O.O O.o >.>
Ungha-ungha cha-cha-CHA!
I showed up at 7:45 & was parked there just long enough to watch the IT lady show up.
"Wow, you're here bright and early."
I said I would be, didn't I?
"Well, yes, actually you DID, didn't you? Ok, well, what have you got for us?"
I pull the system out of the back of my truck, throw my toolbelt over my shoulder, & follow her into the building.
We head for the testing room where I promptly disassemble the dead computer & move all the cards to the new one.
She comes back in with a small binder of CD's & COA's/Reg Codes & says "Install as much of that as you can fit, and don't worry if there's not enough room - this one [the dead unit] barely fit half of it. Call me if you need anything."
Windows XP Pro, a ton of "in-house" testing programs (mostly CBT style bits), and what has GOT to be THE biggest single-software package I've EVER run across. *Fourteen CD's* worth of "required corporate software" packages! (It turns out that the cd's are "home burnt" style "updates" for things that XP SP2 already took care of, so most of them involve inserting the cd, telling it to run, & hitting cancel on the box that pops up saying "This computer already has a newer version of...")
Shaking my head, I get started installing it all...
An hour later I've finished installing everything (I put the 160Gig HD in it "just in case") & moving all the software settings/!PLAIN TEXT PASSWORDS!/email bits, internet connection settings, etc.
I do some tweaking (disabling un-needed services, maxing buffers, making sure the firewall/AV/Spybot settings won't interfere with the intranet, & that all the drivers are completely up to date), make things look nice & pretty, and do a "test run" through the general program load the system was supposed to handle.
It runs like a champ & makes the other system look like a Yugo compaired to a McClaren.
I go out, find her, smile & say "Ok, what's next?"
She nearly chokes on her doughnut. "You're done? It's only been... an hour & a half!"
She gets up, walks into the testing room, and asks "Why is it off? It takes FOREVER to get started every morning!"
Not any more it doesn't. Go ahead, turn it on.
She reaches over, hits the power switch, and starts to make herself comfortable as if this will take a while.
Eighty-seven seconds later (I counted) it's sitting with a ready desktop, a blinking mouse, and all their programs loaded in the background ready to be used.
She just sits there looking like a doe in the headlights.
Reaches over, tells it to reboot, and times it herself from power-up to desktop.
"Where's the chicken blood & feathers?"
I blink a few times & ask "What?"
"Because this HAS to be voodoo witch-doctor magic or something. I know the old system wasn't THAT much slower than this sytem, but it used to take over an HOUR to get to a state where it could be used. THIS is... is... *incredible*."
I start laughing & have to sit down.
When I finally recover, I walk her through all the things I did to make the system go fast, show her all the caching options I'd enabled/disabled in order to make the system prefetch regularly used programs, & the services that it was NOT running when they weren't needed.
Then I pointed to a small, green box in the sys-tray.
See this? This is a small program call RamDef-XT.
All it does is monitor your RAM and, once it hits a certain level of fragmentation, for lack of a better word, it pauses the system for a moment, 'defrags" the RAM, & free's up any orphaned processes it finds.
So, effectively every two seconds, RamDef forces your system to either make a process DO something, or risk having it turned off until it DOES do something.
The savings in cache times alone makes it worth running, but it REALLY shines when you've got a ton of browser windows open & IE keeps trying to demand more RAM for threads it isn't even using any more.
Go ahead, give it a shot. Open IE and launch as many windows as you like, then watch what happens...
She fires up IE, launches like twenty windows in a row, and we watch the RamDef systray icon go from gree to yellow, to red... pause... and flicker back to green.
Ok, now use a Control-Alt-Del and look at the Performance tab in the Task Manager screen.
She does, and it shows a brief spike of 100% on the CPU and RAM, then it slams back down to around 45%.
"Damn... That is freaking.... *wow*. And you say you DON'T have a degree in doing this?"
No M'am. I don't have a piece of paper "proving" that I know how to do the very things I've just done, but in the light that I've just *done them*, what good is the piece of paper?
"Well, you've got a point, but that piece of paper would look SO good on your resume."
This is true, which is why I want to work here.
Once I've got a source of income, I can afford to go back to school & GET a degree.
Without a job, I can't afford the time in school to learn the skills that would be used to pay for school.
She stands, smiles broadly, & extends her hand.
"Well, congratulations. If you didn't have the job before, you sure as hell do NOW."
I shake her hand, but then frown & say "But I've got some bad news for you."
She looks at me askance & says "What?"
You had your passwords stored on the old system as plain text, which is how I had to transferr them over to the new system, but I *strongly* suggest changing that ASAP.
If someone decides to hack in, they can have every password you've got on that machine in under two minutes.
Now, I realize it's only connected to your intra-office network, and that's not really a high-security risk per-se, but as a general rule, it's not a good idea to store your passwords in a way that anyone opening *notepad* can get to them as easily as writing a letter to dear old mom.
She looks at the computer, then back to me & asks "How do I encrypt them without causing undue stress on the system resources?"
So I sit her down and show her how to make them encrypted from the get-go in the future, and then walk her through encrypting the ones she's already got stored.
By the time we're done, it's effectively noon.
She stands up, looks at the clock, & asks "Do you have someplace to be this afternoon, or are you free for lunch?"
I am agreeable to food at this point (being that I last ate around 6am & my tummy is making noises like "Feed me or I kill you!") & say so.
Next thing I know, we're at Applebee's, lunch on the company, discussing my new employment contract.
I'll be working directly for her, supporting the intra-office network, and doing what-ever needs to be done to connect to the corporate network (in Tulsa) so they no longer have to rely on FedEx to deliver physical software packages for the office to deal with.
I don't care.
It's $10/hour to start with for the first "90 day probationary period" and then merit-based raise-evaluations every six months there-after, working a standard 8 hour day, 5 day week.
*SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE*
I'm EMPLOYED!
DRINKS ON ME! WOO HOO!
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