Ticket: net is broken

[mattm04]

Oh joy. I got the "net is broken" ticket to try to fix, from one of our well known users. All the detail I got was was they can't see the internet. Great. Plenty of detail to fix it.

I call them and get no more detail over the phone and decide to try to remote in. Hmm. Not working. I go down to their desk where they tell me they unplugged the PC because, well, they weren't sure why. I plug it in and boot it up and ask the user to login and show me the problem.

They do. To my horror, they can see the internet, about a inch of it on the bottom of the screen. They had somehow installed 18 tool bars. Of course the browser, IE, took several minutes do do anything useful, but I finally removed them all.

I left them and put in a ticket to have the PC re-imaged that night. While I didn't check, I'm sure we got a ticket about the now "broken" PC.

Anyone have a better toolbar record? Is their a limit?

[Ironclad Alibi]

I did a Google image search for "too many toolbars". Some of the screens are completely covered with toolbars.

[fireheart]

I did a Google image search for "too many toolbars". Some of the screens are completely covered with toolbars.

*clicks on link*

Ow. My brain is broken.

I weep for those poor computers

[lordlundar]

*clicks on link*

Ow. My brain is broken.

Shares the same state as those computers would be my guess.

[earl colby pottinger]

I was offered a partnership with a guy who needed someone to write software for him.

The offer was 50% of the profit once the business started going. Since I was unemployed I went to his house to see his set-up.

75% of the screen was tool-bars - I told him that I could not work with him until he got rid of all the junk (I even explained why so many was a bad idea and how he probably could replace 3-5 tool-bars with just 1 of the proper tool-bars). He insisted that he needed them all to do his work. I left his place and never returned despite all the emails he has sent me since.

[mattm04]

I did a Google image search for "too many toolbars". Some of the screens are completely covered with toolbars.

Pretty much what I found. It was a 17" LCD at 1024x768 and all but a inch or so was not toolbars.

[Amadan]

Ah the hell that is wading through customers machine with 100 toolbars, that I miss not. Especially the malware type ones like mywebsearch and zinga.

Surely the toolbars issue could be resolved by stopping lusers from installing anything? I happen to work for a company which is good enough to give most people local admin rights on their machines however I'm pretty sure you'd get your arse roasted and any admin privs removed for pulling a stunt like that.

[houdini]

Surely the toolbars issue could be resolved by stopping lusers from installing anything?

Unfortunately my company runs from the principle of locking down everything and considering everyone an idiot until proved otherwise. It's been endlessly frustrating - at one point they even locked out task manager on one of our machines. We pointed out that the two people using that computer did, in fact, know what they were doing - and while they were at it, could we have MS Office back on it as well? We sort of needed bits of it to, y'know, WORK.

[Amadan]

Unfortunately my company runs from the principle of locking down everything and considering everyone an idiot until proved otherwise. It's been endlessly frustrating - at one point they even locked out task manager on one of our machines. We pointed out that the two people using that computer did, in fact, know what they were doing - and while they were at it, could we have MS Office back on it as well? We sort of needed bits of it to, y'know, WORK.

Oh how I wish the IT dept would remove Orriface from our systems. If I never had to use it again it would make my life so much better, just give us Putty and a web browser (preferably not IE but it'll do at a push).

Although Outlook is useful to keep track of the myriad of conf calls and meetings/training sessions and Office communicator allows you to procrastinate talking to people rather that actually working.