meh, bad day at work.

I got a call at 10PM last night from my boss, who explained that this director who works under the vice president was having serious performance issues with his laptop. Executive support couldn't fix it and it had been passed through several high end techs already.

Now it came down to our group(desktop support), and my boss wanted me to look at it. I was nervous of course, as royally screwing up a directors laptop = fired for life(cough)

I arranged a time and met with him at 7AM this morning. He had serious performance issues on his laptop, mainly with Office 2007 which had recently been deployed. Whenever he attempted to open an office file...it would take several minutes. Once in, if he tried to work on an excel spreadsheet or a word document...everything from typing, to bolding font, to print preview...would take forever to load.

I did a lot of research the night beforehand, so I went in prepared. I tried turning off the print spooler service in case it was a printing-related issue, and viola...worked. The documents opened normally. However with print spooler turned off, he wouldn't be able to print anything.

I removed his printers and drivers, reinstalled, reinstalled the print spooler service...no change. I also checked the registry and made sure the drivers were definitely gone.

I went deeper and turned off DDE for excel/word, but that didn't help either.

I ran filemon along with an excel file, to see if anything was causing excel to become slow...but I saw nothing unusual. The antivirus and firewall were fine, adobe was fine, etc.
Checked event logs and found nothing unusual, though I noted some disk errors that occured the previous year...but they hadn't shown up again.

I tried a dozen other things which were all documented, but nothing worked. Finally I decided to try a different account and logged in with my own domain credentials. I loaded some of his files and they ran perfectly.
O_O

So I created a new profile for him and made sure the files opened fine, and he had no issues. He was quite pleased with this, so I moved the rest of his profile over. I only moved things that wouldn't affect windows settings to much...I didn't want the problem to return.
I moved the Desktop, favorites, My documents, his PST files and address book, and that's about it. I manually readded his PST files, installed his printers one by one, and his network mappings were already linked to his profile. I wanted to make sure the issue wasn't going to come back. Lastly, I transferred his data. He had many many GBs of files related to his projects. During this time, he was sitting in his chair going over files documenting the millions of dollars they were making and spending. <_<;;; >_>;;;

I felt the issue was resolved and left I had done my job. I figured I could walk away with a promotion or something, but that wasn't going to happen.

After his data finished transferring, the problem returned. Major slowdown issues with Office 2007. Took forever to open files.

The director told me that he had the issue for a long time, and that his computer was already reimaged once before. He also had office 2003 and it did the same thing. He's been fighting with it since November or earlier. I knew right then that it had to be something hardware related, but it doesn't make sense as the Office suite runs fine with the print spooler turned off.

I was really weirded out, and just then got an error saying he was out of disk space. I checked the hard drive and he literally had less than 80mb remaining. o_O;
I deleted some huge files and removed his older profile, which freed up some space...but it probably wasn't that much. When I last checked, he had 4GB of free space.

So I ask you Techexams, does it sound like the hard drive(50GB) or could it possibly be some software issue that keeps coming back with his specific laptop?

I talked to my boss about getting a bigger hard drive for the laptop so we could confirm if it was the HDD, but some folks from executive support intervened and told me to stop working on it, and that they were going to look at it again. -_-

Find more posts tagged with

Free for TechExams community: Cybersecurity salary guide

Compare cert salaries and plan your next career move

Button

Comments

genXrcist

I've seen this before, on a Director's PC no less as well! LOL

Yes, if there's virtually no space left on the HDD then the Pagefile swap is faultering. He needs a minimum of 15% FREE space. Then run Disk Cleanup (don't compress files), then defrag and he should be golden.

You could also run a remote perfmon log on his system while it sits idle but why waste time with that since he's a director.

Oh, and you might also want to run sfc /scannow from the run command as well for good measure. Just be sure to have the XP CD handy.

Good luck!

skrpune

OMG, this is sounding a lot like the ticket from hell that I'm working on! Seriously - the performance was absolutely wretched and with no specific cause, and knowing what I know now, I am pretty certain that it was the poor hard drive calling out for help.

If this guy's got that little space left on his HD, then it's definitely (at least partially) a HD issue. Not sure why executive support would have told you to stop working on it...other than the fact that they know you've found the problem and now they want to implement your solution???

ilcram19-2

lol dude come on there is a patch for this, did you even try to get the lastest updates?
outlook 2007 seems to do that with very big mailboxes

ilcram19-2

omg there goes your promotion aaagghhh!!!!! may be next time

genXrcist

This isn't a patching problem, particularily if it goes away for a while after clearing the profile. Given it clears up when the print spooler is disabled (which requires a good chunk of disk space) and comes back when enabled, it is a page swap issue.

redliviu

Do you want a promotion?
Get him an SSD and some RAM , you cannot go wrong

Paperclip

redliviu wrote: »

Do you want a promotion?
Get him an SSD and some RAM , you cannot go wrong

Yeah, except the SSD will probably be small as well. I would suggest these things, in no particular order.

1. Why does he have so much stuff in his profile of his laptop? Can he not VPN or anything when he is offsite and access these files when they are stored on a fileserver? Is it because each individual file is excessively large, or because there are so many of them? Whether the former or the latter, there may be a re-training issue here.

2. New laptop. Anything that came with a stock 50GB HDD is probably old/underpowered for this type of user at this time anyway.

3. Failing 1 and 2 above, more disk space needs to be freed somehow, some way. Does he need only static read access to some of these things? Can they be put on optical media? How's about USB drives (though I know that is a support and administrative nightmare, but if there is no budget it's inavoidable. He can't have this much stuff on his drive and have it keep working.)

A lot of weird and nebulous issues are caused by too low free disk space. Every time I get a call that a bunch of weird stuff is happening for no reason, it's always the drive space on the desktop or laptop.

Psoasman

I would bump up his RAM if possible, increase the page file to maximum, run some malware scans, as malware can reaaaaly slow down the computer. Defrag, check disk should help as well. Show him how to use auto-archive for his outlook

Kaminsky

Upgrade the director !

KGhaleon

Thanks for the suggestions, I'm going to grab a stick of RAM and see if that makes a difference. I think he had 2GB of RAM, so I will have to check and see if he has room for more.
I don't know if it would be malware, if it worked fine on other profiles. He's not the type to use the laptop for anything other than work.

blargoe

redliviu wrote: »

Do you want a promotion?
Get him an SSD and some RAM , you cannot go wrong

Outlook 2007 will CHOKE a laptop with an SSD. Our desktop support group had to return a whole slew of SSD's and exchange them for SATA drives last year because of the way Outlook 2007 writes to SSD drives.

blargoe

chkdsk /r

KGhaleon

blargoe wrote: »

chkdsk /r

Attempted, but he had to leave and take the laptop before it could finish yesterday evening.

Andretii

1. Run CClearner both Cleaner and Registry. Also remove unnecessary start up apps.
2. Run Diskdefrag.exe and set it's processor utilization to the Highest.
3. Disable Office apps Add-ins not needed like Bluetooth, mobile integration and others.

Office 2007 always starts those Add-ins when installed and they cause problems opening and closing apps.

ilcram19-2

genXrcist wrote: »

This isn't a patching problem, particularily if it goes away for a while after clearing the profile. Given it clears up when the print spooler is disabled (which requires a good chunk of disk space) and comes back when enabled, it is a page swap issue.

the patch have worked great for me, im pretty sure the patch fix that issue i dont think u have to updagrade all the computers everytime or do the print spooler thing to be able to get work done dont you think, you probably want to check if he is using a ost file or if he's not caching e-mail on his computer

ilcram19-2

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C262BCFD-1E09-49B6-9003-C4C47539DF66&displaylang=en

explanation of the patch
Performance problems with Microsoft Outlook 2007 .PST and .OST files

KGhaleon

ilcram19-2 wrote: »

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C262BCFD-1E09-49B6-9003-C4C47539DF66&displaylang=en

explanation of the patch
Performance problems with Microsoft Outlook 2007 .PST and .OST files

It's not that big of an issue with Outlook. More Excel/word.

blargoe

Is he using an SSD in his laptop?

loxleynew

Yea get him a bigger HD and more ram. Like others have said 50mb on a laptop.. How old is the thing? Must be ancient.

Definatley seems like a file issue since it was fine until you copied over his files. Also defrag the HD. If you havn't in a while that could help quite a bit.

blargoe

Kingdom Come: Why is Office 2007 slow?

KGhaleon

loxleynew wrote: »

Yea get him a bigger HD and more ram. Like others have said 50mb on a laptop.. How old is the thing? Must be ancient.

Definatley seems like a file issue since it was fine until you copied over his files. Also defrag the HD. If you havn't in a while that could help quite a bit.

50GB.

and he defrags weekly. He seems to be a little tech savvy.

SSD hard drive? Not sure.

Kaminsky

KGhaleon wrote: »

..... He seems to be a little tech savvy.

If you had said that at the start this would have made a whole lot more sense. Best thing you can do is, once sorted, lock it down as much as possible and have your boss back you up on it.... Trust me... Will save you a lot of future grief !

KGhaleon

Kaminsky wrote: »

If you had said that at the start this would have made a whole lot more sense. Best thing you can do is, once sorted, lock it down as much as possible and have your boss back you up on it.... Trust me... Will save you a lot of future grief !

Why? It doesn't mean anything. He knows how to run a defrag. That won't help his issue though.

Kaminsky

In my experience, and I expect it's a global phenomenon, users who know a little bit are a complete nightmare and generally cause the most grief by their fiddling.

I once had a guy reporting his screen was dead. After some subtle questioning, it turned out he had been adjusting the jumper settings on his graphics card to try and make it go faster and couldn't remember the origional settings.

I fixed it then sent it back with desktop secured and even put in security screws into the base unit. Because I stopped him from fiddling he complained to my boss. Boss called me in and eventually backed me up. The guy complained to my director. He called me and my boss in and after explanatio, he too backed up my decision. The guy then complained to the chief exec who called in me, my boss and my director and again he backed me up. This guy was adamane it was his desktop and he should be allowed to fiddle with it however he liked.

Eventually, I had the chief exec jump all over this guy, who was also a director, by explaining to him that it was the companies PC put there to aid him in his work and in effect this director was damaging company property with his fiddling not to mention causing me loads of lost time trying to fix his fiddling.

NightShade03

We have an issue similar to this at work as well. The laptops we use have nothing but office, Adobe suite, and XP installed. They have 80GB (non SSD) drives. The users report the same problems you are explaining, and after 2 months of research we have found 2 things out.

Our users can't store anything locally they have a drive become mapped on logon which contains all their data (avg is about 10GB of user data). Even though you can see all this data via windows explorer opening it in any application kills the computer.

We finally dicovered that it seems to have something to do with the way the open dialog box works in applications (File -> open). It takes forever to load files or locks up the system. Our first issue was that they were trying to view GBs worth of files via File -> Open wirelessly which just doesn't fly well. The open problem (once they plugged in) was solved by having them double click the file to open outside of office and it would open within office and run fine.

You can try changing some of the caching settings in windows as well so it doesn't try to show all his data (esp thumbnails) all the time. You should see a performance improvment.

colebert

blargoe wrote: »

Outlook 2007 will CHOKE a laptop with an SSD. Our desktop support group had to return a whole slew of SSD's and exchange them for SATA drives last year because of the way Outlook 2007 writes to SSD drives.

Yes, but this is not the case on the newer SSDs from Intel and OCZ (Vertex Line). They don't use the Jmicron controllers that "stutter" when very tiny files are written at once.

colebert

Also, could this issue be related in any way to Group Policy / DNS? I have seen systems crawl because they have misconfigured DNS servers or group policies are acting funny. In an enterprise environment Windows looks to it's group policies, etc when doing anything... even things as simple as a right-click context menu. It will hang for long periods of time if something is screwy like that.

Pash

Kaminsky wrote: »

In my experience, and I expect it's a global phenomenon, users who know a little bit are a complete nightmare and generally cause the most grief by their fiddling.

I once had a guy reporting his screen was dead. After some subtle questioning, it turned out he had been adjusting the jumper settings on his graphics card to try and make it go faster and couldn't remember the origional settings.

I fixed it then sent it back with desktop secured and even put in security screws into the base unit. Because I stopped him from fiddling he complained to my boss. Boss called me in and eventually backed me up. The guy complained to my director. He called me and my boss in and after explanatio, he too backed up my decision. The guy then complained to the chief exec who called in me, my boss and my director and again he backed me up. This guy was adamane it was his desktop and he should be allowed to fiddle with it however he liked.

Eventually, I had the chief exec jump all over this guy, who was also a director, by explaining to him that it was the companies PC put there to aid him in his work and in effect this director was damaging company property with his fiddling not to mention causing me loads of lost time trying to fix his fiddling.

This man speaks so much truth, people who think they know a little bit are infact the hardest people to provide support for. Our chemistry director here would fall under that category, so much so that this handy "win2008 spyware remover tool" could not possibly be the spyware detected on his PC, this is microsofts own tool for removal you stupid IT support person. He spent 30 mins teaching me the workings of why he couldnt see his offline folder cache once, i was so impressed I was thinking of paying for the training and asking for a certificate.

Back to the original problem. KGhaleon - You didnt mention at the begining if you had patched it to sp2? I had very simular problems at one of my sites last week and depolyed the service pack to the clients experiencing issues, they havent reported any problems since. Appologies if you have done this already.