Why does IT give us so many headaches?  All professions have their good side and bad side, but IT …

Let’s see, when your car breaks down and you go to the mechanic, it is a headache for sure, but it happens maybe once a year?  When you go to the dentist, brrrrr, another headache, you are going to feel pain and you are going to pay a lot for it!

But IT, well, IT …  Nowadays, if you are sitting in an office, it doesn’t matter what you do, you will probably have a pc in front of you.  Why is IT so problematic?

I can give you thousands of reasons; IT surround us, desktops, laptops, pdas, smartphones, game consoles, etc, plus all of the gadgetry for network, routers, switches, modems, access points, it’s an infinite list.  Is that all?  Of course not; that’s only the hardware!  Yes, you also need software: operating systems, word processors, spread sheets, presentation, scheduling, browsers, antivirus, and I could be here all day listing software …

It’s almost magic that all of this stuff actually works together.  Really!  If you compare a computer with a car, a computer is 100 times more complex, if cars had improved like computers, we would have today a subsonic flying car doing 1,000 km per litre of gas.

Computers double their capacity every 18 months and your smartphone is 100 times faster than the first computers from the 50’s! 

It’s all remarkable, except when it fails, lost files, frozen, BSD, and the other 1,000 glitches that happen now and them.

Why is that?

Two major reasons: quality of pc’s and quality of software.

When you buy a cheap pc you hope for the best.  All the major brands in the market have three lines of pc’s; home pc’s, business pc’s and workstation pc’s.

The quality of the home pc is not the same as a business one. The business machine has more quality and a better assurance from the manufacturer against failure, because if something happens it’s not only recipes that are being lost.

These computers are “hardened” from factory with better hardware and they are the mainstream computers to be tested by software companies.

But why does my “home” computer freeze sometimes, corrupt files, slow down?  Mostly, it is memory problems.  No, don’t go replacing your memory, there is nothing wrong with it.  The hardware in a computer is at war with thousands of signals travelling at the speed of light carrying your information inside and outside of the machine, kilobytes, megabytes, terabytes of information, but when just a tiny bit goes wrong, your computer is gone, files corrupted, frozen, etc …

“_ hi, helpdesk ? My computer is frozen, can you do something?” 

“_ could you please restart your machine?”

Users hate to hear that, but it’s true, a wrong bit of information will freeze your computer and corrupt your file and the only way to recover is … restarting the machine.  For home computers it might be acceptable that it happens once a week, for business machines, once a month, for servers, once a year!  Ah, ok, so you are telling me to buy a server?  Well if you have plenty of money, a server costs at least five times more than a pc.

Server memory has ECC  which is technology to track this wrong bit’s in the hardware side . Memory for servers are three times more expensive than pc memory.

But it still does not guarantee you with flawless working.  Software inside the pc is also at war, rushing for every cycle of your CPU and your memory. Sometimes this war has causalities and the more software you put in your machine, the higher the probability that it will crash.

Software companies do a lot of testing.  Priority one is, guess?   Servers, business pc’s and your poor home pc is the last one.  It’s virtually impossible for a software company to test their software against all the other software available in the market.  Then comes the incompatibilities between them.

Again memory is the biggest problem; as the programs compete for memory resources, they sometimes conflict with each other with the most common consequence being memory “leakage”.  What? Bits and bytes are leaking inside my computer?  Noooooo.  Leakage drains memory to nowhere, it is memory that has been used by a program or programs, but because of these conflicts, it was never released!

With time this will increase until you don’t have any more memory available for the programs, then things start to get slow.

And if all this problem from software companies and hardware companies wasn’t enough, there are still other factor:  virus, Trojans, malware, root kits, etc …

You can now see that is not an easy task to keep a computer running and running without any problems, but we do our best.

Our company has 500 desktops, 100 laptops, 20 Servers, 50 printers, 20 routers, 5 firewalls, 30 switches, 20 DSL lines, 30 3G modems/routers, 3 leased lines, 5 PABX, 350 telephone extensions, few kilometers of cabling, intranet, intenet, Inact, PMIS, GIS and all the remaining thousand software that goes into it in 7 distinct locations!

Mind that when you complain about Messenger not working !