Big company crappy laptop
- Thread starter edscdk
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What a spanner!
We (Corporate IT) do notice and will take action....
We had someone return a work laptop a couple of weeks ago when they left which incidentally had a "broken" hard drive. We pulled it apart to have a look and it had a 2 week old Western Digital hard drive "fitted" (not exactly standard fit in a 2 year old Lenovo, was missing a screw on the sled and the drive pins were bent). They've been caught red handed trying to steal corporate software yet won't admit it and are refusing to return our drive. HR have now initiated proceedings against said individual...
Not even I'd **** around with mine as SMS etc watches all we do. Better plan is to get another drive caddy and a spare drive then have you own image for messing about with outside the office.
We (Corporate IT) do notice and will take action....
We had someone return a work laptop a couple of weeks ago when they left which incidentally had a "broken" hard drive. We pulled it apart to have a look and it had a 2 week old Western Digital hard drive "fitted" (not exactly standard fit in a 2 year old Lenovo, was missing a screw on the sled and the drive pins were bent). They've been caught red handed trying to steal corporate software yet won't admit it and are refusing to return our drive. HR have now initiated proceedings against said individual...
Not even I'd **** around with mine as SMS etc watches all we do. Better plan is to get another drive caddy and a spare drive then have you own image for messing about with outside the office.
Out of curiosity, I have a question for you guys who do look after the work laptops and such.
How often do you get problems caused because people don't understand their computer so well (getting viruses and such) when compared with problems caused by people who do have an idea and are trying to do things they shouldn't be doing?
Is it quite common to find younger staff with a fair knowledge of computers doing naughty things as well? Or is it a case of you know what they are up to but can't proove it?
Oh and finally.... you must have found porn on peoples work comptuers before now?
How often do you get problems caused because people don't understand their computer so well (getting viruses and such) when compared with problems caused by people who do have an idea and are trying to do things they shouldn't be doing?
Is it quite common to find younger staff with a fair knowledge of computers doing naughty things as well? Or is it a case of you know what they are up to but can't proove it?
Oh and finally.... you must have found porn on peoples work comptuers before now?
The police have been called on more than one occasion, where I work, due to this.
Just because it was porn? I would have thought that would be a case of some sort of disciplinary action from work or just a good laugh for you guys? Calling in the police for a naughty picture seems harsh
(or a naughty film.... or 10gbs worth of naughty films...)Something like paedophilia for the the police to be called in I guess, in which case it's obviously deserved.
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With a decent environment you will get less problems of the first type and if it's locked down properly the second type is less common. A couple of years ago we had a lot of spyware related problems from website visits. An upgrade of the anti-virus software and anti-spyware software has elimated 99% of these. We've also locked the PCs down with regards to admin rights to stop the users cocking around with PCs and installing their own software has stopped as well. It was rather unpopular but then again they brought it on themselves....
We usually find out, but toothless management won't always do much about it. We've had the usual stuff - mp3s on file servers, people bringing their own laptops in and trying to use bittorrent on our 30Mb pipe etc. Once they've been caught it usually stops.
I couldn't possibly comment
ps - although I'm in security it's a different team that deals with this side of things, so I didn't have to deal with it. Not sure how I would deal with someone that had that sort of stuff, to be honest.
Sadly that wouldn't do, it would be too restrictive, its a complex matter really
its a case of too many admin rights = slow laptops (there own fault)
or
too few admin rights = lots of complaining and work for us
Personally id prefer they had there slow laptops and we told them where to stick it every time they whinge
(politely of course)
Soldato
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IBM expect most employees to keep their laptops for 4 years. People who run a lot of virtual machines often get through them every 18 months tho.
What the OP has done is stupid.
What the OP has done is stupid.
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Another question. Wouldn't it be possible to run schemes where the people who have shown you that you can trust them have more access rights, whereas those who abuse their systems loose access rights and are possibly giver older systems? Might be a pain to run but surely its the best of both worlds? It would act as a deterrant to misusing the comptuers as well.
Exactly. Couldn't agree more...
what on earth? you don't have a proxy in place?
for the guy who asked about installing itunes etc.. it's not that we're software nazis, it's just that any software on a machine that we don't know about is software that we don't support. If something goes wrong with your machine and it's caused by user installed software, then how are we ever going to fix the problem when we don't know it's even there?
Fortunately, most of the users' machines are too slow to run anything but Citrix
Soldato
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I have PowerDVD on my work laptop, came with the laptop and was put on by IT Support after they imaged it, (which was nice of them) ... do I use it ... not normally as I have other kit at home but I know other people that do. I know people who have iTunes on their work machines too but I don't think that it's a good idea.
In general you shouldn't be using work machines for non-work functions even outside office hours. You pick a basic laptop very cheaply nowadays and you don't know what monitoring is on place on the company one, (for all you know they have something on the laptop which monitors exactly what sites you go to and uploads that info to a central server when you attach to the corporate lan .. do you want your work to know every site which you go to?)
I did know a couple of people who used to use their work laptops as their only machines ... they tended to have to get them reimaged fairly often iand in the end got in trouble for it.
That is Hilarious! Were they shown the door?
what on earth? you don't have a proxy in place?
for the guy who asked about installing itunes etc.. it's not that we're software nazis, it's just that any software on a machine that we don't know about is software that we don't support. If something goes wrong with your machine and it's caused by user installed software, then how are we ever going to fix the problem when we don't know it's even there?
Fortunately, most of the users' machines are too slow to run anything but Citrix
He'd purely by luck got a corrupted user account and even without explicit rights managed to add his personal laptop to the domain, at which point the proxy policy was applied to his user account via GPO.
I found the machine when the hostname obviously didn't fit with out naming scheme so I removed it and he re-added it back. This happened twice in a week. The second time we had all the monitoring turned on and caught him red handed.
He got a right bollocking, but the union stepped in to back him up so he's still got a job ... as a parking nazi.
Soldato
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After one of our sales people left, I was cleaning his old Laptop and found loads of gay porn and stuff starring "Ben Dover". I could never think of him the same again, he was married. One would think he would have been more careful, but his departure was rather swift.
We here give people admin of their machines, most need it for AutoCAD but because the people here are mature engineers and intelligent trust worthy people we give them the benefit of the doubt 
It's a very laid back company you can pop on Facebook or watch iPlayer at dinner, we've had one case of p2p at site and they were subsequently locked down.
There really wasn't much of an IT Dept before I came here so in the process of getting things standardised and implementing proper GPOS and security groups, very zzz.
no, just PM their R&D plant builds
It's a very laid back company you can pop on Facebook or watch iPlayer at dinner, we've had one case of p2p at site and they were subsequently locked down.
There really wasn't much of an IT Dept before I came here so in the process of getting things standardised and implementing proper GPOS and security groups, very zzz.
no, just PM their R&D plant builds