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‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

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41–50 of 264 posts

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#41
post #12
post #8

I’m impressed with the person that waited over an hour to get into outlook. With determination like that no enemy stands a chance

I'd love to know WHY it takes over an hour to load Outlook? Can anyone enlighten me as to what takes the time? Is it connecting to something and periodically backing off when it can't? Scanning something? What?

Could be handshake/sync. Could also be indexing (which doesnt prevent Outlook from loading but practically can prevent you from using it if you can't search, etc)

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#42

Not to be missed in the article: The Air Force has a "chief of esports and virtual fitness"

The US army has sponsored development of games quite a lot; I remember a friend of mine who was really into America's Army, that must've been 15 years ago now.

The US military is very serious about its recruiting.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#43
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were to guess and remember my time working at a 'hot desking' company, it's because on login, the user's profile will be copied from a central server onto the local system. I found out this is a thing when Chrome and Firefox started to put their files in the user's home directory by default. If that has to traverse a network - and who knows where all that data is coming from or how fast the internet connection i…

Interesting. So potentially downloading the entire browser cache each time? Goodness.

I remember "fixing" the university's computers by preventing the browser cache from being downloaded. at every Windows startup. That was maybe 15 years ago?

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#44
post #12
post #8

I’m impressed with the person that waited over an hour to get into outlook. With determination like that no enemy stands a chance

I'd love to know WHY it takes over an hour to load Outlook? Can anyone enlighten me as to what takes the time? Is it connecting to something and periodically backing off when it can't? Scanning something? What?

Maybe Russian AND Chinese spyware on a Windows XP machine trying to open current version of outlook that is unoptimized for old computers.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#45
post #12
post #8

I’m impressed with the person that waited over an hour to get into outlook. With determination like that no enemy stands a chance

I'd love to know WHY it takes over an hour to load Outlook? Can anyone enlighten me as to what takes the time? Is it connecting to something and periodically backing off when it can't? Scanning something? What?

If your windows desktop is “shared” between computers in a domain, and the computer you are logging in is old, you are doomed.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#46
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a internship one time where by the end of the two month stint my machine would take upwards of 45 minutes to login because there was something that was running on login that had to timeout (because it was broken). Sometimes IT pushes policies that conflict with other stuff and rarely do they check every configuration (or setup alerting for these bad cases). There's lots of reasons it can happen though (es…

> Couple that with all the security crap the DoD has to put on there (which probably spends half its time trying to grab resources from the other security software) Corporate spyware is a huge impact to performance, particularly if you have an HDD. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen a computer start to lock up because some security software needs to absolutely abuse the disk.

A “boon” is something that is helpful, not detrimental

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#47
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were to guess and remember my time working at a 'hot desking' company, it's because on login, the user's profile will be copied from a central server onto the local system. I found out this is a thing when Chrome and Firefox started to put their files in the user's home directory by default. If that has to traverse a network - and who knows where all that data is coming from or how fast the internet connection i…

Interesting. So potentially downloading the entire browser cache each time? Goodness.

Even better - Java devs who use the default settings for Maven will have their entire local repo copied over the network.

At my company people would remotely log in on Sunday evenings to avoid the hou long wait while a few hundred gigs get copied across the network. Why not chnage the location of the local repo, you ask? Of course our machines are locked down and we have no access to the local drive...

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#48
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to know WHY it takes over an hour to load Outlook? Can anyone enlighten me as to what takes the time? Is it connecting to something and periodically backing off when it can't? Scanning something? What?

If I were to guess and remember my time working at a 'hot desking' company, it's because on login, the user's profile will be copied from a central server onto the local system. I found out this is a thing when Chrome and Firefox started to put their files in the user's home directory by default. If that has to traverse a network - and who knows where all that data is coming from or how fast the internet connection i…

There's a few ways to set up profiles in Windows, and most of them are terrible. If you have the joy of stepping into a network with roaming profiles enabled, you will discover it takes years to untangle.

The idea that you can log into any PC and your local desktop and documents all appear seems really nice, but the implementation weeds are nasty: I tell people to store things they want to access on multiple computers on a network share, and we replicate basically nothing between client PCs.

Outlook also likes to download a large chunk of a user's mail archive locally each time you open it on a PC, but you can configure it a bit, and Outlook generally "works fine" while downloading. I suspect it gets hairier at DOD scale though.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#49
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a internship one time where by the end of the two month stint my machine would take upwards of 45 minutes to login because there was something that was running on login that had to timeout (because it was broken). Sometimes IT pushes policies that conflict with other stuff and rarely do they check every configuration (or setup alerting for these bad cases). There's lots of reasons it can happen though (es…

> Couple that with all the security crap the DoD has to put on there (which probably spends half its time trying to grab resources from the other security software) Corporate spyware is a huge impact to performance, particularly if you have an HDD. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen a computer start to lock up because some security software needs to absolutely abuse the disk.

I'm in security, and one thing I always try to stress is that if the security software is causing work stoppages, it should be treated with the same importance as an outage. Just as you wouldn't tolerate an internet connection that went down all the time. Outages from security measures are still outages.

Re: ‘Fix My Computer’ Cry Echos on Social Media; Air Force CIO Responds

#50
post #12
post #8

I’m impressed with the person that waited over an hour to get into outlook. With determination like that no enemy stands a chance

I'd love to know WHY it takes over an hour to load Outlook? Can anyone enlighten me as to what takes the time? Is it connecting to something and periodically backing off when it can't? Scanning something? What?

Currently a Air National Guardsmen. I've only had it take that long a handful of times. Usually when it does it is running Microsofts Endpoint Manager and trying to push updates, Scan with McAfee and Tanium, and loading a bunch of scripts in the background that are checking for compliance, setting a default AF or local Comm Squadon background, posting messages relating to the current security levels, etc. Its alot to all run as soon as booted and some things could and should be delegated for off hours but its not how its currently set. Typically the first 30 minutes of my morning is waiting for Outlook, Edge/Chrome, and Teams to open before even trying to open any tools. Also from working in Comm I've seen how they purchase hardware and its pretty frustrating. They will purchase 100 laptops at the end of the year to fill their budget for hte year, but its the lowest priced laptop, which is still almost double or triple what you can purchase it for as a civilian, then often times it will sit in storage and no one will touch it. This often happens due to the leadership not having any actual IT knowledge and they make the purchasing calls so performance isnt at the forefront of their mind.
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