Charles Socci - Information Technology

From the console in my Taxi this evening… First question my wife asked (she’s also in IT) was, “Did you click OK to terminate the program…” I said, “Honey, you know I’ve been in IT way too long to do some rookie thing like that…” and so it stayed.

I serve a large organization with multiple branch offices in remote places. Typically, these offices are staffed with from one to fifty employees. Most of the offices have a local Windows Domain Controller, which doubles as a file/print server, DNS, and DHCP server. The larger of the offices are usually connected to the Internet via [...]

Windows add/remove programs windows components error caused by service pack 3 and nLite.

Why is it that I can Google nearly any event log error or ID in Windows and come up with at least a few references, yet when I use the built in links to research the error with Microsoft at least half the time I come up with, “No results were found for your query. [...]

I’m not a fan of Outlook. I think it is bloated, slow, and prone to any number of issues. That’s me. I like a nice, compact, fast email client that lets me get through all my email quickly. I’ve always liked Outlook Express and wondered why more people don’t pay any attention to it. I [...]

Recently I tried to export to a .csv from Outlook. Outlook kept crashing. I tried on another machine, same thing. I had another admin try on his computer, and his crashed too. I found a lot online about software conflicts and plug-ins. None of these applied. I tried Outlook safe mode, still crashed. The answer [...]

Well, I resigned myself to the cold hard truth. After many years in a career largely built upon the ability to support Microsoft enterprise systems I have to admit it: Microsoft Sucks. Here’s why. I work for a very large nonprofit humanitarian organization. In all fairness, we have received generous gifts from Microsoft in the [...]

I used to have a nice Dell workstation at work, XP Pro, a GB of RAM, a 7200 RPM SATA hard drive, and some kind of P4 2.x GHz processor and it worked quite smoothly and briskly. (these are important and very technical terms, take note: smooth and brisk). I then let my boss convince [...]

This is a typical Microsoft weird issue you might spend weeks trying to figure out and it is as easy as un checking a check box. Problem: When connected to my internal LAN via VPN client, or through IPSec tunnel I can’t upload FTP files to my internal FTP server. Additionally, when trying to access [...]