Recently at a client site, I witnessed a proactive IT manager cut her company’s overhead by making a couple of phone calls. She was auditing phone charges and discovered that her bosses had been paying for phone lines that they weren’t using. It turns out that the phone system they had in place didn’t require extra analog lines for faxing. That was missed initially because the right people didn’t have the right information. The error was caught, at last, because an IT manager who had learned more about how the phone system worked had started scrutinizing the connections and auditing expenses. She took the time to match phone line to function. When a couple of lines led to no equipment, she called her equipment vendor to confirm that the lines weren’t required. She then called her provider and canceled the lines, saving her company over $600 per month.

Unnecessary expenses like these are easy to miss in any business, large or small. The systems are complicated, and oversight by trained individuals is often lacking as personnel change and equipment gets updated. Suddenly, that analog line that ran everything doesn’t do anything. For this reason, telco equipment is the worst. Even great IT managers will understandably tend to leave the telco engineering to vendors and service providers, taking it on faith that new systems were set up correctly; or that updates to older systems will be followed up with dropped charges for discontinued services and equipment.

But once you’ve spent enough time administering a system and have learned some of the ins and outs, you need to start asking questions. What does this do? Do we really need this? Can someone else provide the same thing for less?

With economic recovery still eluding us, now is the time for businesses and individuals to scrutinize their operating costs. If you’re paying for it, make sure you’re using it, and get rid of it if you aren’t. While you’re at it, contact your service providers to see which ones are willing to lower costs to keep your business. Competition is stiff all over, and with VoIP and cable companies now offering phone services, AT&T and other big telcos are lowering some costs. You’d be surprised how little it takes to trim the bottom line.

I just got a good deal on Lenovo 3000 N100 machines with a free memory upgrade, so I bought three for the office. Vista still isn’t ready for prime-time, so I got Windows XP Pro recovery disks with the machines and downgraded from Vista to XP. This makes them great machines, especially for the price. However, browsing in Explorer or Internet Explorer causes the touchpad to lock up for a few seconds.

I’ve removed all unnecessary programs (including Diskeeper Lite), have patched Windows XP and upgraded all drivers, and I even upgraded to IE 7, but the touchpad still hangs for a few seconds.

The problem is definitely software related since it doesn’t occur in Safe Mode, and it doesn’t occur in Firefox (my preferred browser anyway). But it does occur even when an external mouse is attached. Because there’s no replacement for Explorer itself, moreover, it makes file management go slower. Every time a user opens a new folder in My Computer or Explorer, the cursor freezes for a few seconds.

I saw one other post on this, in Notebook Forums, but no reply was posted. I guess I’m going to have to contact Lenovo or return three otherwise great laptops.

OK, here’s one that belongs squarely in the unexplained weirdness category. A customer is running Terminal Server and recently had a remote user with a Mac start logging in. The remote user is using the latest Remote Desktop Connection client for Mac, which happens to be listed as a beta version (RDC 2.0 Beta).

Now if you know anything about RDC, you know that remote users can enable an option that connects their local disk drives when they remote into the TS, and they need to do that if they plan to do any file transfers between host server and remote computer so they can work offline. When that feature is enabled, TS shows the client drives at the bottom of a My Computer window and lists them as “C on RemotePCName” where “RemotePCName” is the actual name of the computer the user is logging in from. That is, if I’m using a computer called “Home Machine,” my local harddrive should be listed as “C on Home Machine.”

Other users logged into the Terminal Server at the same time would see their local drives listed with the names of their own home computers. At least, that’s how it should work.

However, when the Mac user logs into the TS with his Mac, his Mac’s computer name hijacks the system so that everyone’s local drives are listed as “C on MacMachine” where “MacMachine” is the name of the Mac user’s home computer. The system still correctly maps to each user’s local drives; it’s just the name that’s wrong. So the error isn’t a big deal, but it is confusing to remote users (many of whom aren’t particularly saavy about file management anyway).

The only “fix” I’ve found is simply to reboot the Terminal Server, which works fine until the Mac user logs in again. I also can’t tell if the problem occurs only when he Disconnects from RDC instead of Logging Off his session (the recommended procedure).

Even though the problem is being caused by a Mac, the client is provided by Microsoft, so it’s their issue. I’ve Googled the problem, but haven’t found anything, partly because it’s a difficult issue to describe. But if you’ve run across this and especially if you’ve found a permanent fix, please comment.