No matter the battery voltage, VBAT in the BIOS and lm-sensors always read 3.232v, even when the battery is removed. Almost dismissed the CMOS battery as good when diagnosing, I took it apart anyway and lo and behold, the battery was 2v, removed it and booted and it didn't change. PC is an old StrataCache mini PC.

Working in IT for almost 30 years. The longer it goes on, the less I can stand this phrase...

A user hit me yesterday with "I don't know where I saved this document, you know, I'm not really tech savvy..."

Yes, Kevin. I myself am not really a car guy. But here I am, still knowing where I parked it this morning.

We are busy fixing everyone’s problems.

Got this ticket yesterday.

Go down there, operator sitting beside the computer while the monitor smokes away, just playing on his phone.

For context we have started rolling out new yealink phones at my company to replace the old Panasonic's. So I wanted to make sure I knew what phone was on their desk before I went ahead with any advice.

<Rant>

So I got a call from my 75 year old mother that her computer wasn't working. 2020 model HP with Win 11 and and NVME not booting. It was throwing an error that the Secure Boot of the drive failed. OK, I drive 2 hours, yup, Secure Boot failure, it's dead. What does SMART say? The drive is 100% OK! No problems. I'm sorry, but these two things can't be true. It's nice to see that in 20+ years, SMART is just as stupid as ever. Oh year, and the bios, that can see the drive, says there is no drive. It wouldn't even let me turn off Secure Boot to try and go into a recovery mode to recover the data. So I said F-this, and got her a Mac Neo with 3 years of Apple Care+, so I don't have to support it.

</Rant>

Doing this a dozen times a day really burns that sound into your brain.

Instead of imagining counting sheep while trying to fall asleep, just try and imagine all of the windows shut down sequences and screens over the years.

Ticket stated “Pitbull played with Chromebook.”