Free IT desktop, helpdesk, and network management software
Posted on August 28, 2007 - Filed Under IT Job Stuff | 1 Comment
As an IT Professional, I’m constantly on the lookout for free desktop management, inventory management, network monitoring, and helpdesk/ticket management software. Usually, to get a complete software package for Windows with all the features mentioned above, you would have to buy something like Microsoft’s System Management Server or SMS, which is costly and mostly only used by large corporations.
If you’re a small or medium-sized business, open-source or cheaper third-party software is usually the solution. However, I just ran across a piece of software called Spiceworks IT Desktop that looks too good to be true! Spiceworks is a IT desktop and network management software that is completely free. The feature list is just incredible:
Actual Microsoft Interview Questions
Posted on April 13, 2007 - Filed Under IT Job Stuff | 2 Comments
Ohhhhh I don’t think I would be able to work at Microsoft after reading the questions they ask during the interview!! Well some of them are not too bad, but I hate those riddle type questions! I can never solve a riddle (ahem, no comment on that please)!!
Anyway, if you want to put yourself to the test, than you can check out some of the questions here. I’m not sure how legit these questions are, but by browsing through them it seems that these were not just made up by some random person.
PayScale.com – Compare your salary to what others actually make in the same position
Posted on April 3, 2007 - Filed Under IT Job Stuff | 1 Comment
I wrote a post about PayScale.com a while back, but I really didn’t go into much detail about it. It’s different from Salary.com in that Salary.com gives you a report of a salary based on what information it can get from corporations. PayScale.com takes it the other way around: you give your current position and salary and that gives you access to pay information that others have posted in the same way.
Great tool for Help Desk/System Admintrator Professionals – Change Analysis Diagnostic tool
Posted on March 30, 2007 - Filed Under IT Job Stuff | Leave a Comment
I just found a very cool tool released by Microsoft this week called the Change Analysis Diagonstic tool, which track changes made to specific parts of the operating system. The tool is for support professionals who want to know what changes were made to a system before it started having problems, so that they can narrow down what things to troubleshoot.
Nowadays, users are able to install programs, change browser settings, fool with the OS configuration, etc that it makes it very difficult to troubleshoot a task sometimes. Unless of course you have all your computers locked down, but then they’ll complain they can’t get any work done! 
More VBS Scripts for System Administrators
Posted on March 30, 2007 - Filed Under IT Job Stuff | Leave a Comment
Over the past few years as a Systems Admin, I’ve had to write a good number of scripts to manage desktops, security, and data backup. Here are a couple of short scripts that I’ve used in my environment!
How to create a shortcut on the desktop – Using this script, you can get a reference to the destop using the special folders function, so you don’t have to worry about the exact path for each user. Then just point to a URL or in my case, an internal web server.
Top things Windows System Administrators should and should not do!
Posted on March 14, 2007 - Filed Under IT Job Stuff | Leave a Comment
As a Systems Administrator for a small company for several years, here are a few things I learned the hard way when it comes to managing IT operations, which I condensed down into the SHOULD and SHOULD NOT!
As a Systems Administrator you…
1. SHOULD NOT update ANYTHING on production servers unless you have tested it in a virtual environment first. This goes for the obvious patches, service packs, and drivers, but also for any software applications. If you can’t test it, then you should not install it. If it is a critical security patch and you are not able to test it in a virtual or lab environment, then you should be absolutely certain you have all the backups needed to fully recover the server in case of a system failure.
