Day 3: Dell Vostro v130–Turning Heads.

Out on the road today with site visits as part of my contractual monthly routine.I sell Dell kit predominately and this means I am familiar with specification , build and performance. Site visits allow me to monitor and experience any issues arising from the equipments installation. For a client this involves me carrying out the following tasks.

Run up TaskManager and see that the reported memory usage is averaging out to what I might expect for loaded performance. If I am seeing large chunks of memory being hogged by an application that draws my attention then I take time to find out why and resolve it. Likewise I check on CPU usage to see if something unexpected is eating the cycles of the machine.

Open MSCONFIG and check for services running that are not Microsoft. and in doing so I may not see hidden or root kit services but some of the more ordinary conflated application installs will stand out and between services and startups I can identify applications installed by employees that may detract from the PC performance.

Goto Control Panel applications installed and check for installed applications that may not be client appropriate.

Check that Antivirus is running and upto date and running its preferred engine and response. In general an infected machine wont let you get to the control panel, task manager or anti virus software so by this point if I am not experiencing problems then I can assume that applications are per spec and operations are nominal.

Run Updates for browsers, email clients , adobe flash and adobe PDF . Because there is always at least one of these to be carried out and running it means the client does not have to ( or may not have done )

The process takes anywhere between 5 to 20 minutes per machine and allows me to ask the employees if there is anything that I need to be made aware of which often generates additional paid work for a later date.

Meanwhile the Vostro V130 is out on the table and employees are looking at it and asking questions. It turns heads, there is no doubt that the style and the ‘thinness’ of the build  attract questions and I get time to talk about the build, the battery life and the performance. Most people wont know what the intel iSeries or CPU processors mean to their experience and  with many users  still locked into a ‘2GB 32bit world’ it can be hard to explain. Suffice to say when I pop open the Computer Management console and drop down the CPU list and show them the cores their own response is usually “Coooaaaar !” it is a  visual experience showing the CPU in the drop down and saying , each one of those is equivalent to 1 computer on your desk. Size really does matter.

Thanks for reading.