Posts by dkenned1

Forgot your ThinkPad password? Get new hardware

Had to do this

My laptop was stolen and several months later it was actually returned, but the thing had been bricked by the thieves witht the supervisor password nonsense. I also had the 3 year warranty and gold support or whatever from lenovo and they refused to fix it even though I'm the registered owner. Pretty frustrating. They explained that if the motherboard hardware failed they would replace it.

What I did was find the TPM chip on the motherboard, solder a few wires to it, hook up the serial connection and reset it. not an easy task and not for the faint of heart, but i figured it was bricked anyway so I took the risk.

not the easiest solder connection on that board and it was on the bottom of the unit, it was challenging but in the end i got it fixed.

IBM T61

Desktops are seen as unimportant until...

It takes some work

Make sure you are keeping track of the calls, have that data.

Analyze a month of one sample group's trouble tickets and calculate how much downtime the user group experiences in a month. Multiply that by 12 for a complete year estimate and divide by 1880 (working hours in a year) and thats how many resources you're going to 'add' in productivity.

Real example: 50 users with experienced 2300 hours of downtime a year, 1 1/2 headcount lost in productivity. Estimating 1 1/2 people at $75k, we replaced the group's PC's for $22k. This figure did not include the added mental health of IT or posslble savings within IT, just the business group.

Additional risks avoided: data stored on local disks, management of software licensing and patching.

We also included a true lifecycle of 3 years for laptops and 5 years for desktops based on hardware failure rates. Also laptop vs desktop costs are higher but are justified with work from home 1 hour a week.

This is often a struggle to include the entire TCO including downtime, hardware costs, software costs, IT time and risk.

Calculate the average salary of the workers with new PC's and the downtime