IT support hears from a user that his computer’s clock keeps losing time and Outlook is always late in notifying him of his appointments. A new computer doesn’t solve the problem, and eventually everyone runs out of ideas and turn the ticket over to pilot fish.
But fish doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary either. His eye is drawn, however, to the user’s desktop background, a picture of user’s sports car. Just for the heck of it, fish checks the image file, and it turns out it’s a high-resolution bitmap image — a really huge one for that machine.
So fish asks user to try removing the image from his desktop just for one day as a test, and user agrees.
Two days later, user calls fish. Everything is now working perfectly, he says, but can I have my desktop background back?
“I changed his sports-car bitmap to a lower-resolution JPEG image and reset his background for him,” says fish. “He never had a problem with his PC clock again.”
Feed the Shark! Send me your true tales of IT life at sharky@computerworld.com. You can also subscribe to the Daily Shark Newsletter.