Sunday 19 March 2017

Equipment Exchanges and Cabinets

As a device and installation engineer I try, where the opportunity presents itself, to leave behind a good impression to the customer whatever the situation at site might be when dealing with the tech problems. Invariably, people complain about untidy cabinets and cabling, but forget that the client/customer may have had to effect quick upgrades or office reshuffles. Furthermore, not everything can be perfectly in order as some work maybe in progress due to testing - over hours, days or weeks. Often clients and customers are not technical so may not wish to touch electrical and comms cabling in fear of causing a fault or communications cease to work altogether. Often, products are sold to clients/customers where the instructions state "quick and easy to install". Those instructions often take no account of other equipment or cabling in the vicinity.

 
As a device engineer I can be faced with having to work with simply providing a like-for-like exchange and leave it at that; the customer may be very busy and not have the time or budget to enter into discussions about improvements.


Where opportunities are there, though, I try to leave a good impression with client/customer; when this can be achieved simply by sorting out the equipment in the cabinet and tidying up the cabling.


Not difficult to do, but leaves a good impression with the client/customer.

If your organisation needs a device engineer with knowledge, skills and experience like this, send an email to: smithgwork2003@gmail.com

Scanner Doesn't Work

As a device engineer, over the years, it has exposed me to a wide range of operational issues with workplace devices. For instance, retailers use a range of handle-held scanners. This has spawned a variety of titles given to these products, such as HHT (hand held terminal), hand-gun, mobile computing scanner, palm pilot and so on.

Equally, this brings unlimited amounts of knowledge, skills and experience that is gained when dealing with fault finding or onsite diagnosis. A common fault report received is "Scanner doesn't work". This commonly stated fault report leaves the engineer with little to go on. However, the term "doesn't work" offers a starting pointing and that is "Does the device power up"?



One approach is to test the non-working device with the same battery that was in the unit when it was reported faulty. The engineer will recognise straightaway the device isn't faulty but the battery has exceeded its battery life and needs to be returned to the supplier for re-calibration, re-setting and re-charging or the supplier needs to dispose of the battery and a new one supplied.

Being customer focussed this is important to me because?

1) There is a vast difference in cost, for one thing, replacing a HHT is far most costly as opposed to replacing a battery.
2) Taking a scanner (HHT) offline has a higher negative efficiency impact on a business in keeping product on shelving; batteries can be obtained far more easily.
3) Inventory checking is hampered when the scanner is offline.
4) Scanners are often used to create "reduced pricing labels" for goods (particularly food that will go to waste if not sold by end-of-day) and lost sales.
5) Staff are delayed manually creating labels, reducing staff productivity in-store
6) Etc.

If your organisation needs a device engineer with knowledge, skills and experience like this, send an email to: smithgwork2003@gmail.com

Saturday 18 March 2017

Online Bitdefender Test

This is a nice assistive determination tool for an online virus scanner. It's initial function is to identify if known virus (viruses) is/are active or idle on a PC, laptop etc., and then do more. Find out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitdefender

http://quickscan.bitdefender.com/


Wednesday 7 December 2016

RegScanner

RegScanner is an excellent registry discovery tool which helps when troubleshooting in the field and a tool I use frequently. It is also it is very useful as a training tool, and its free.
 


A common PC/laptop investigation item is any connections to USB ports and usually wanting to see all USB activity, which the output from RegScanner produces data in the output pane (below):


USB activity relevant to troubleshoot: HKEY\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\DeviceClasses\
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/jj649944(v=vs.85).aspx

This tool very useful when training new engineers.

Lastly and best of all this tool is free.

Team Viewer



As a field service engineer there are many occasions when consumers or businesses need to have assessed/diagnosed a laptop/PC problem urgently when an engineer cannot get to site to assess with what the user considers, or at least perceives, to be a hardware or software failure.

Team Viewer is a popular remote access service that enables that permits an engineer to remotely access the laptop/PC. The service comes with a number of built in protection safeguards that keeps the user in control. Specific unique 'YOUR ID' which should not be used by any other user of the service. Moreover, the use of one-time-password ensures that once the remote engineer has completed any fix that it within the scope of the work the engineer can undertake, then once the user closes the programme, the link to the distant engineer terminates and the engineer cannot re-access the user's laptop/PC using the same one-time-password.

 
 
For more details look here: https://www.teamviewer.com/en/use-cases/
 
 
 
 


IPv4 Multicast

 
 
Download PDF - IPv4_Multicast.pdf

IPv6


Download PDF - IPv6.pdf