HELP!!!!!! IT Advice needed

[SparkOut]

This sounds like contractor "over- inflation of the task" because the local council are paying.

Yes, hence the tongue in cheek comment about the rates and duration for MBH, Scurra and myself to do the job.
It's not your responsibility Eirian, of course, but your employers are being rooked.

Allow me also to offer to prepare a disaster recovery plan, of course after a 6 week fact-finding mission, 1 month's analysis and 2 weeks preparation of the results, for a proposal that will cost £10,000 in consultancy fees (in addition to the daily expenses for the mentioned periods, naturally!)

[kingsley]

Our school computers have got this virus on them, and when the IT teacher told us not to use USB's at home or school until the virus has gone and they could 'clean' them for us, one girl put up her hand and said 'Miss, does that mean that we don't have to do IT homework?'!

[Bunnylump]

Nice try, I have to say!

[kingsley]

The teacher said 'No, come in at lunchtime to do it', but if she's saying that to everyone then the computers are either fully booked at lunchtime or shut down because they're trying to sort out the virus.

[MBH]

.....and their major projects complete on schedule?

As if THAT was going to happen


I've got my bucket of soapy water and scrubbing brush - lets get started

[eirian]

I'm sorry, but, ok initially the Council was conned (got cheap antivirus software), but since then, in the last 4 weeks or so, I would say IT are doing everything in their power to get this fixed as quickly as possible. The reason I was skeptical about you cleaning all the PCs in the timescale, was I thought you were suggesting that just the 3 of you would do it. Bring in unlimited people, and yes, I'm sure you could do it (assuming they were sufficiently skillful)

Now, ok, so I'm not an expert, but the trouble is, I'm more computer literate than most normal Council workers and even I was using infected USB sticks and transferring the virus around between PCs without realising. And it took rather a long time before all Council staff (and there are probably close to 10k of us) remembered to leave the PCs on overnight so IT could access them remotely. The 2k PCs are those left to be cleaned - no idea how many they've already done.

I think what's happening is that PCs are being cleaned, the antivirus installed, but the antivirus is needing to be updated almost instantly due to the worm morphing, and because of all the network issues (the network traffic caused by the virus is overloading the servers), this isn't easy to do - just because a PC isn't infected any more, doesn't mean it's got access to the right bit of the network to enable the AV to update, so as soon as someone brings an infected memory stick / emails an infected file to the PC, it gets infected again....

Oh and don't get me started on completing major projects. Whatever impression you have of local councils, believe me, we do everything we can to get things done or your Council Tax bills would notice! (last week's successful job could have cost £10M if we'd made any errors)

[SparkOut]

I don't want to go too far, because I'm not facing the situation and don't know exactly what it is, but I was being flippant before, in that I believe that I could clean 2K pcs solo in rather less than 60 days.
Now I believe that your IT people are doing their best - but cleaning is one thing, and they are facing the problem of a pretty chaotic scenario. (I have to question why people are typically moving files about from machine to machine by use of USB flash drives, for example. This strikes me as a mark of a drawback in the network structure. Without the virus issues, say before it struck, what would have happened if you tried to work at someone else's desk for the day, using a different PC? Would you have no access to your files and been hampered in doing the things you need?) So probably instead of being able to focus on fixing the problem, they are running around catching the new outbreaks, and having to rescue files stored on individual machines. If the worst came to the worst, they should be able to have a clean and up to date "image" of the computer operating system and all software required which they can either push out from the network, or if they did have to go to each machine it would be a case of "pulling in" a ghost image. If all the files and profiles for the individual users were centrally stored and the servers ensured that those files were clean, then you could have access to them on whatever machine you used in the network.

[MBH]

Oh and don't get me started on completing major projects. Whatever impression you have of local councils, believe me, we do everything we can to get things done or your Council Tax bills would notice! (last week's successful job could have cost £10M if we'd made any errors)

No Hassle I'm working for Sunderland Council (almost 6 years now), but have a 20-year history in a commercial software house, so my view of 'projects' is skewed. I tend to hear the 'national' ICT projects the hit the news and I think to myself "How on earth did they let THAT happen!"

[eirian]

the problem is that the virus activity has caused the network to fail in places. This means that, in order to continue working, I (and others) have had to work exclusively off our C Drives. (we normally use a shared H Drive - before the virus and associated network issues we can log on to any machine and work normally as everything would be on the shared drive) So our documents are on our C Drives. I have no way of transferring these documents to other people without using the USB stick.
For the first couple of weeks, other people were unable to print. I could print. If I needed to print other people's docs, I needed to transfer those docs to my PC - via the USB stick, as I don't have access to whereever they've stored their files.

We've now all been given local printer access, so at least that problem is sorted, but I still can only access C Drive and Internet, nothing else at all.

[giraffe]

HELP I have a problem.
I must have hit somethin_ My computer won't let me type the letter between F and H Everytime I do I _et a little strip at the bottom that seems to be somethin_ to do with _oo_le (our favourite search en_ine) How do I solve this?


Just realised that if I don't solve this I won't be able to loG on (It seems to let me do capital GGGGGGG)


Edit: ggggggggggggggggggggggggggg phew!

still not sure what I did to set that off.

[Bunnylump]

Were you being affected by the G force? Or was someone pulling your G string. iraffe?

[MBH]

OK - that's fairly high on the "Weird" scale My initial reaction would be SO-SO-TA

{All together now}

Switch Off, Switch On, Try Again



This reminds me of a works story years ago. It was a company that made the plastic windows that go into caravans, and the 'office' was a portokabin INSIDE the factory.

The initial call said that the computer wasn't allowing them to backspace... I said it was years ago? These computers didn't have a backspace key - you needed to do CTRL+H to do it.

When I got there I found that not only could they not backspace, but they would have a devil of a job typing anything for Him, Her, or tHe otHer - the 'H' key wasn't working at all - it wouldn't even press down.

Being highly technical I levered off the key top (they were exchangeable in those days) and removed the wedge of window plastic that had got down between the keys and come to rest under the 'H' key.

[giraffe]

I didn't dare switch off, because I need a G to log in!

I think I cured it by turning something called "google desktop " off. (I didn't know I had it)

[Bunnylump]

So you weren't tempted to start levering keys off then, a la MBH then?

[fernando]

I am doing a questionaire on excel for my maths homework but I am trying to type a category into one of the cells as 1-5. Annoyingly, the computer has decided that it knows best and has automatically changed it to a date (1/5/2009) Does anybody know how to get it back to how it was intended?

Thanls.

[LAT]

You can either change the format for the cell to text or you can type an apostrophe before the 1-5 which does the same thing when a number is actually text.

hope that helps

[fernando]

Thank you! Giraffe suddenly remembered about the apostrophe before we looked on here but thank you for your help anyway.

[MBH]

Ha - I was beaten to the punch by a sozzled puss-cat I'm getting old

Well done LAT on knowing both answers

[giraffe]

We tried reformatting the cell, but it wouldn't work. I was quite impressed that I remembered the apostrophe method. About 20 years ago I was quite good at excel, but it's amazing how much you can forget in that time if you don't ever use it.

[Bunnylump]

Well I learned something here. I didn't know about the apostrophe thing. Good tip.