@Dashrender said in Excel freezing:

@bbigford said in Excel freezing:

Microsoft only recently changed the "recommended" install to 64-bit.

Hardware acceleration has given me heartache in the past.

Disable add-ins, then enable one by one to see which one causes a hang (if any are causing that).

Run a memtest, I've (rarely) had this cause the issue but sometimes a bad stick from the factory has caused Excel-heavy users to experience performance issues.

On older PCs, it's sometimes due to a failing drive; but it's unlikely the SSD from the factory is the issue. Just worth noting.

Beyond that, it's often content based... pulling tons of links from the network, updating various content on the network that's using cells in the sheets, etc.

Decent list of options

1. user is on 64 bit - I made the switch for my images about the time MS made the recommendation change
2. hardware acceleration is disabled, but only after reported issues
3. there are zero Office add-ons
4. good idea - I'll run a memtest tonight. This is a 6 month old workstation class HP machine, though it does not have ECC RAM.
5. could be failing drive - but this user has been having issues for years over 4+ different machines, seems unlikely.
6. The files do all live on the network - a Windows 2012 R2 server. Most if not all of the excel files do not reference other worksheets.

Ah, you'll waste your time on memtest. I didn't realize it was happening on 4 different workstations. It's not the workstation.

I've also had this be a permissions issue. I had one weird incident where a file had share and NTFS permissions all over the place. It was basically recalculating the perms while they worked, because I changed shared to FC everyone and gave the person most access to the folder and the issue went away.

Nice video.

I've found in conversations that if I provided too much technical detail, thinking they wanted to know, it ultimately destroys the conversation and gets everyone off track. Approaching conversations with business value first, technical second, was an interesting growth area for me.

@Emad-R said in Robocopy/7-zip bat file with high compression ratio:

try to use those

simple put ``` at the start and end to make block

And that looks very complex, robocopy is meant to be easy I used it back in the day

simply

robocopy /mir /mt source target

anytime you want to make full copy make 7zip archive of it, like snapshot.

I use /mir /mt: most often. Works fine. I sometimes forget /mt: and immediately see slowness with large jobs.

Microsoft only recently changed the "recommended" install to 64-bit.

Hardware acceleration has given me heartache in the past.

Disable add-ins, then enable one by one to see which one causes a hang (if any are causing that).

Run a memtest, I've (rarely) had this cause the issue but sometimes a bad stick from the factory has caused Excel-heavy users to experience performance issues.

On older PCs, it's sometimes due to a failing drive; but it's unlikely the SSD from the factory is the issue. Just worth noting.

Beyond that, it's often content based... pulling tons of links from the network, updating various content on the network that's using cells in the sheets, etc.

FastStone also works fine.

https://chocolatey.org/packages/fsviewer

We support several tools for BYOD, VMware Workspace One and Microsoft InTune being the most common.

For the companies that support BYOD, they will ask some specific users to put email and company apps on their phone; but they don't strongly imply or anything toeing legal related.

The MDM solution used is really specific on the data that it can see and has control over. If a user chooses to use their personal device, they are agreeing to have that company data controlled, not their entire device; meaning that if they leave the company then the company can remotely remove that data from their device. The company is also monitoring the usage of that data within that company app, as part of the terms that the user is displayed with upon setting up the app.

If a user is provided a company stipend for a cell phone, by using their personal phone, there may be qualifications of a device that have to be met. These could include: phone call and SMS text messaging availability, photos, email, and specific company apps that run on a certain platform such as Android and/or iOS. Basically, the company will provide a stipend to most modern smart phones, no flip phones as they likely don't have the basic functionality for certain things such as email/etc. If a user is uncomfortable with the company having any access to their device, then they can go without the stipend, but the company is thereby not allowed to attempt contacting the person on their personal device as that's a clear separation; another alternative is a company requiring the employee to carry a company-provided device instead of offering a stipend, with certain hours/days that the employee must respond to inquiries using the device (possibly even limited to whom they are able to respond, i.e. no personal calls made or personal data stored).

@scottalanmiller said in KVM Desktop Setup Ideas:

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

KVM is also nice because you can continue using that machine as a regular desktop as well, if you need to do so. (Can't do that with VMware, Hyper-V or XenServer).

No one expects to use their Type 1 hypervisor as a desktop.

What? Tons do. Both KVM and Hyper-V are very popular for exactly this.

No. . . very few people say "I'm going to install Hyper-V and use it as my daily driver on my Dell Server" no one does that.

Actually a HUGE number do. It's insanely common for developers especially and IT folk. It's hard to state how common this is.

Have you never heard of the desktop virtualization market? This is a totally normal thing. Nearly everyone I know does this, both IT and dev and loads that are neither.

The only reason I don't use Hyper-V for testing is because we get VMware Workstation for free as a partner; I used VirtualBox for a long time when Hyper-V on Windows 7 couldn't create virtual machines, just to test out a few things or use it as a place to keep up-to-date images which I could capture later for deployment without using any additional server resources.

Type 1 definitely runs better as it doesn't stack the hypervisor on top of the OS, but I definitely don't see VMware Workstation going away.

I can see a couple niche things about VMware Workstation though; of course, there is more to add to the list. 1) Many that don't use it to push new configs to their VMware environment; if it's just being used as stand alone for some VMs, you could use literally anything else (and many are free obviously). 2) Nested virtualization to test clustering, site replication, etc while not needing to buy really expensive hardware.

One thing I am shocked many MSPs don't do, which we've done since the first deployment, is secure each Office 365 CSP account (delegated access to each customer through one provider portal) with MFA. In reality, if the MSP was compromised, every customer is then compromised.

I also witnessed many MSPs not securing their secure password databases with MFA. They secured the front end client application in case a computer was compromised or stolen, but the database itself was wide open.

@StorageNinja said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:

@bbigford said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:

They are slow as fuck in most environments

Are they slow, or did someone underprovision the Shitrix environment behind it?

Not a configuration issue with infrastructure (Citrix or VMware), since zero clients ran great. The thin hardware endpoints were always just slow as fuck.