List No. 1:

11 Tips to Avoid Problems & Stay Productive with your Office PC

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The Causes of Computer & Networking Problems & How to Solve them

General Advice on Office Networking

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List No.1: 11 Tips to Avoid Problems & Stay Productive with your Office PC

1 – Try a Reboot

The majority of problems that happen with PCs are due to the active program code and data, held in RAM, becoming scrambled and are not caused by faults with the hardware or programs stored on the hard drive. Reloading the RAM from scratch usually restores normal operation. The first thing to try, therefore, when something’s amiss, is a full reboot.
Follow this procedure:-

Close all programs and select Shutdown from the Start Menu. If things are taking too long, wait until the hard disk access light has been off for a few seconds and then turn the power off. If the power switch is not responding pull the mains plug out.

Here are some reasons not to:-

"...a Cornell University study calculated that the US could switch off 7 power stations if TVs, videos and computers were not left on standby."

New Scientist Article

In a networked office My Documents is normally located on a server computer’s hard drive.

This means it’s more reliable and secure than on your own PC, it gets backed-up daily by someone else, and it’s password-protected against the wrong people accessing your files or accidentally deleting them.
Data is easier to find in My Documents as this is where most programs look first.

(press Control + Alt + Delete).

Don’t let your emails get out of hand. The more emails a folder contains the slower things operate and most email programs have a size limit for folders which could be equivalent to as little as a year’s worth of emails. If you want to keep old emails, make new folders with names such as “April to June 2002” and move emails from your Inbox into them.

Look in Sent Items to see what you can delete – emails with attachments occupy the most room.
Empty the Deleted Items folder regularly.

If you work somewhere that insists you use complex passwords that have to be changed every month, previous passwords can’t be reused and you have to use several systems like this, all with different passwords, then you’ll know what password-hell is.

However, even in a relaxed, co-operative, information-sharing office, it’s advisable to have a simple password, that only you know, to access your computer and which isn’t written on a Post-It note stuck to the monitor.
Have it so that the password has to be re-entered to cancel the screensaver.
This stops “visitors” messing about with your system, deleting your files, closing programs without saving the changes you’ve made, sending emails under your name, putting rude pictures or messages on your desktop and leaving a trail of undesirable websites in your Internet Explorer cache.
Don’t share a username and password with others. Extra network logon accounts don’t usually cost anything and many actions on a network can be audited – try explaining why the system log shows your account as the one that deleted this month’s payroll data.

First check the printer for error messages like “Paper Jam” or “Load A4”.
If it says “Load Letter” then the document you’re trying to print is formatted for the US Letter size paper – press “Continue”, if there is such a button, for the printer to do its best to print it on A4 or go back and cancel the job, reformat the document in Page Setup and try again.
If you get “Load Letter” with every document you print then your PC’s printer settings need changing.

With a networked printer check to see if its icon is greyed-out in Start - Settings - Printers. If it is, right-click the icon and get rid of the tick next to “Use Printer Offline” and the printer should then burst into life.

Request a second printer to be setup on your PC, if there is one not too far away, and learn how to direct your print jobs to it from a program’s print dialogue.

Do you have a dial-up service where you pay per minute or is there a fixed monthly fee for unlimited access?
Do 20 of you share a 64kbps connection so that one person listening to an Internet radio station all day is using up half of this bandwidth?

The procedure for changing a password varies between the different versions of Windows - do you know how to change yours?

Give it a test - maybe once every 6 months is reasonable:-

Here are some things to try before you call your local IT support:-

Your IT Support genuinely wants to be helpful and many problems are easy to fix.

Your problem may also be indicative of some wider issue which your report may help to solve.
Report your problem by email if you don’t think it warrants a telephone call.

As with individual PCs, all a server that’s malfunctioning may need is a reboot. If your IT support are not always on-site and available during business hours then see if you can get them to agree to you being trusted to reboot servers (best of luck!).
You need to learn where the servers are, which ones do what job, and the safe way to reboot them.
Always try to speak to the IT people on the phone while you’re doing it.

The Internet has temptations for everybody and if your company permits unrestricted access over a high-bandwidth connection it’s easy to be distracted, to the point of obsession, from your main work. Although viewing pornography jumps to mind as the main temptation, a recent survey  showed this to constitute only 15% of non-productive Internet use. Other distractions include downloading music files or videos, playing games and chat rooms.
Be aware ever-watchful server may be logging all your Internet activity and any stores of downloaded files could easily be discovered even after you've done your best to delete them.
Another survey found that 23% of UK companies have fired someone for inappropriate Internet use.
There are plenty of software tools that can be run on a company’s main Internet access server which can remove all these temptations without interfering with normal business Internet activity.

We’ve all heard about the problems of bad posture and repetitive strain injury caused by sitting in front of a computer for too long and, of course, the main way computers do us harm is by entrancing us to continue to sit in front of them, hour after hour, when we could be out in the fresh air getting some exercise or engaging in some form of human interaction.
Here is a list of more specific injuries computers can cause, most of which I’ve suffered personally.

1 – Near-Death Experience

In the days of AT power supplies the mains voltage was led to the front panel power switch and one day while groping around inside a computer that was turned on with its cover off my fingers touched a terminal on this switch with 240 volts on it. I jumped a mile but, as with the dozen other times I've touched the mains, my skin resistance at the time was high enough or my heart wasn’t at the danger point in its beating cycle to be fatal. Modern computers have ATX power supplies where dangerous voltages are confined to the inside of the power supply module.

2 – Sharp Case Edges

Fitting drives and drive bays, prising off blank panels, pushing or pulling DC power connectors or straining to fit the second part of the clip that holds the heatsink to the processor socket: one slip and you're sure to find those sharp metal edges that tear flesh.

3 – Hot Components

Those metal heatsinks can get pretty hot, especially when the fans on cooling duty are getting tired and everything's hidden under a thick blanket of dead skin flakes and other dust but, ouch, how can that hard drive which, by the way contains all my important data, keep working at such a high temperature?

4 – Finger in the Fan

With so many to choose from in the interior of a modern PC it's easy for your little finger to stray into the blades of a cooling fan.
Zzzzzzzrt they growl but the soft plastic blades aren't vicious enough to cause serious harm.

5 – Exploding CDs

52x CD ROM drives are now commonplace and such a drive spins CDs at over 10,000rpm. That means the outer edge of the CD is travelling at 94mph. If a CD has a crack, has become brittle with age or its hole is ever so slightly off-centre then watch out. There have been several reported cases of  a CD disintegrating and the splinters bursting through the door and flying out of the front.
Some Swedes conducted a series of experiments here where undamaged CDs were spun up to destruction. Things got dangerous around 23,000rpm and none survived past 28,600rpm. So steer clear of any 115x CD drives.
A piece of software that can limit the maximum speed of a CD drive is  Nero DriveSpeed however it doesn't work with all drives.

6 – Poisonous Gases from an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)

The worst case of this I know of was with a UPS the size of a small car which powered several racks of equipment. When the lead-acid gel batteries got too old they started to emit a pungent gas. This particular UPS had been placed out of sight in the air-conditioning room right next to the main air-return pipe so, like a scene from a James Bond film, the gas was pumped around the whole floor to emerge hissing from every vent. OK it didn't hiss but the office had to be evacuated with some people going to hospital.

7 – Exploding Capacitors

The spike suppression capacitors in a power supply are the most likely ones to explode, usually with a jet of flame bursting through their surface. The worst experience I had was when I was repairing a video monitor and had my head buried in the back, little knowing that one of the electrolytic capacitors had turned into a suicide bomber. Luckily the phone rang and I was picking it up when the capacitor let go, filling the air with smoke and ticker-tape.

8 – Speaker Volume Too High

You didn’t notice the hiss from the speakers over all the fan noise from the system box which otherwise might have alerted you to the fact that the last person to use the computer had, perhaps, been watching a silent video clip and in an effort to hear the non-existent soundtrack had turned all the volume controls and knobs up to maximum before giving up and walking away.
Eventually you click on something with a sound associated with it and TA-DAH! booms out making you jump out of your skin as other family members and neighbour ask you if don’t know what time it is and tell you to keep quiet.

9 – Spiders/Dead Mouse in the Case

I was involved in a case where a mouse got inside the power supply of a larger computer and met its end, teeth clenched to a high voltage terminal. The warmth of the power supply accelerated decomposition and I was part of the team summoned to investigate the smell. I somehow avoided being the one to remove and dispose of the 2-week-old corpse. OK disgusting, but surely not an example of physical harm? (Ask the mouse.)
The most dangerous of spiders is the Australian Funnel-web. Fortunately this species only makes its home in damp surroundings. Australia's number 2 spider to avoid, the Redback, however thinks dark, dry, warm if a little noisy and windy places are ideal conditions to start a family. A hapless PC technician working on a computer in Australia, turned on with the cover off can not only get a jolt from the power switch, slice a finger on the case, burn their hand on a heatsink while dodging pieces of CD and clouds of poisonous gas but can be bitten by enraged mother Redback and sprayed in the face by a stream of panicked baby Redbacks who've all run headlong into the nearest fan.

Latrodectus hasselti

10 – Computer Induced Stress Disorder

You know that awful feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realise you've just overwritten the only copy of a document you've spent the past week working on. Then there's the depression and excess stomach acid caused when you've got an important day's work ahead and it begins with the unfamiliar and alarming noise of a broken hard drive which you know, as you watch your frozen screen, will never again deliver up any useful data. There are many days ahead of wasted time and money before you can again see something resembling the Desktop you took for granted a matter of hours ago.
You can tell people who've suffered such pains – they're the ones who actually make backups.