Keep your utilities close and your users closer.

As I have mentioned before, I am working for the network team of the University. It is not the most exciting job, but at some points trying to figure out what's wrong with the user's PC can be as interesting as traveling to the moon. The last user could not browse with her IE, but could connect with her Skype account. Visiting the user, I had the suspicion that checking her settings and firewall would do the trick. I was very wrong, however. Her computer (an XP machine by the way) was running about 20 applications at start-up, was incredibly slow and did not allow commands given in command line to be executed (ipconfig /all, ping etc). Wanting just to see if it is an IE-related problem, I disabled the firewall, installed Firefox and tried to run it. It did not however run. My next easy step was to install my favorite antivirus program and run a full system scan. This took me about 40 minutes. 40 boring minutes where we both tried to break the silence with smalltalk. The user told me that she had recently visited Cyprus, by the way ("beautiful country"). When the scan was finished, so was the awkwardness. The results however troubled me. Not a single virus found. Once the computer restarted I gave the firewall rules a thorough inspection. Nothing weird found there. I ran firefox and this time not only it ran, it also allowed browsing. That's were it hit me. It turned out that when the user had visited Cyprus, she was given a proxy in order to browse. She had meticulously hidden this fact from me. Naughty user. I restored this setting and she was ready to go. Everything running as smoothly as an overloaded XP machine can handle. Total time taken: 50 minutes of which wasted: 40.

At the end of the day, all that matters is correct communication with the user. Our whole conversation was around her skype account and the potential viruses she might have gathered rather than the last time she had to "change something as small as 4 numbers in a box"...

Note to self: Both MSN messenger and Yahoo messenger uses the "Internet Setiings's Proxy server", while Skype does not. That's bad for Skype. Even if it has a Proxy settings pane in it menu, it should all be centralized.