Almost the End of the Week...

[equusmaximus]

     As I mentioned earlier in the week, Monday was pretty chaotic; One would have thought that the rain would have calmed things down because the farmers wouldn't be out harvesting.  Wrong...  Downtime due to weather means that they can take some time to work on their machines instead, and that makes things extra busy at work!  Tuesday was a

Comments

[pjladyfox]

Just a bit of a quick note for you but you really could save yourself the "drudgery of loading all the software and drivers" by installing a DVD-R/RW drive in the system, boot with a Ghost 2003 rescue disk, and after you install said software make a bootable recovery DVD. I do this as part of my regular job stuff and believe me it saves a LOT of time over the course of the initial creation of the image.

Then, all you have to make sure of is to not change the hardware too much and you're pretty much set. Heck, if you wished to use one image for several systems just ensure that they all have the same general motherboard, sound, and video and you can use the same image since a different CPU, hard drives, optical drive, or RAM will not change nor affect the image itself.

[equusmaximus]

It's good advice, and something I'd definitely do if I were the one setting up and running all the computers at the shop. However, that's David's realm, and the fact that he even lets me near the set-up is a great show of faith.

Ideally, all of the machines should be as nearly identical as possible, and they should all be higher-quality. That might happen in the future, but I'm not going to hold my breath. The unfortunate thing with smaller family-run businesses is that computers are often overlooked, even though they're pretty much crucial to running the place. There are two things that I really need to convince him about before I try to get him to do a "universal upgrade"... 1) We need to get UPS systems on all of the computers. I think the shipping computer's death-blow came from a power-surge. 2) I really want to convince him to let us set up a wireless laptop (or two) for doing the Inventory in late October. All of the Inventory is tracked by the computers, and it would be so much easier to wheel a laptop on a cart up

[xander_opal]

Heh, you remind me of something I had to deal with a couple days ago. 688 rotary corn header on a forage chopper, JD all around, that my uncle owns; we hire him to do custom harvesting for us in the fall. Anyway, as can be seen from http://www.deere.com/servlet/ProdCatProduct?tM=FR&pNbr=0688%20KM it has folding wings for transport. One of the bearings in the right side's drive shaft went out... guess who got to lay on their back to torch out the old outer race because they remembered vaguely what had to be done last time...

Heh, another parts story from the customer perspective. A few years ago, one of the knife sections on our combine's grain table broke right at the end. Not about to pass the opportunity up, I drove to the local dealership, put the 10' section on one shoulder, walked up to the parts counter, and said, 'I need me one a' these.'