Friday, March 9, 2012

FREE Network Management and Helpdesk software

My company previously used LANDesk software for antivirus, deployment and system management. While it is great software, it is pretty expensive. The company, which is a small to medium size, wanted something more cost-effective. I did some research and chose Symantec Endpoint Protection for anti-virus and Spiceworks for Network Management. SEP is is not cheap either but less expensive than the whole LANDesk suite and Spiceworks is FREE. It is ad-supported but they are NOT intrusive at all.

Spiceworks also does not require an agent be deployed to all your systems. It will query them with existing network management protocols. You will then have an inventory of all your computers, printers, switches, software, etc. It will keep track of quotes and purchasing, and has a helpdesk/ticketing software built in! It has been a big help and I am learning more uses for it all the time.


Check it out at www.spiceworks.com

Friday, November 11, 2011

Thank You, Veterans

Today is Veterans Day. A day to honor our military. They are the ones who risk and give their lives every day  so the rest of us can sleep in peace at night.

Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue

SALUTE!

Thursday, November 10, 2011

HP DV6 - outcome

Back in June I posted about the HP laptop overheating. I tried the copper shims and new thermal compound but sadly the laptop continued to have the same problem. I'm at a loss on this one!

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Blog Purpose

I just made a post a few minutes ago about a laptop issue I am facing. I then realized, the last time I posted on my blog before today was 2 years ago! So, I wanted to make this post to introduce myself and talk about the current purpose of the blog.

Hey, my name is Andrew. I have an Associate in Applied Science in Network Engineering. I have quite a few years experience with computers and networks, including 3 years professionally. I currently work as an IT Tech for a retail business.

This blog was originally created as a required school project for my Web Multimedia class. I posted periodically for class but that was about it. That is changing! I will now use this blog for tech related things. As you probably saw, I kicked it off with the laptop issue. I will post about other issues I come across with computers and how I fixed them. I will post tips and tricks, and perhaps some tutorials on computer building and the like. I also have been known to dabble in computer programming so you may see some posts on that as well. Stay tuned!

HP DV6 laptop heat issues

My Dad has an HP DV6-1238nr laptop. It gets really hot and if playing a flash game for 30 minutes or so, the display will go blank and you have to reboot. I did some research on the internet and it turns out other people are having this issue too with various HP DV model laptops. Some people experience it without even running a game.
The issue can be traced to poor design of the cooling system and more specifically, the GPU is over heating. Based on my research, I will attempt to remedy the problem by replacing the thermal compound with fresh, good quality thermal compound as well as put a copper shim on top of the GPU between the heat sink and thermal compound. I have ordered the copper shim and will try this out as soon as it arrives.
I'll post back with the results!

Updated: The copper shim did not help. See my updated post here