Seeking your techno guru

Hiring an excellent IT consultant is worth spending time on, The worst I’ve taken over from included one deliberately sabotaging machines he charged to fix, another stole RAM and optical drives from PCs. Though criminal acts are rare, by far the greater risk is hiring a well meaning under-skilled expert who will sell you kit you don’t need. Unlike other professionals, there’s no regulatory body ensuring we are competent. Put t as much effort into the process as you would when recruiting permanent staff. Getting it wrong can cripple your business.

1. Seek recommendations from other businesses like yours. Yellow Pages is a goldmine of advice when you ask nicely.

2. Qualifications are very desirable, but several years actual experience is vital.

3. I’m not a fan of standard references, who can’t find a friend who will say the right thing? Query what sort of organisations they’ve done work for, ask for a couple of examples that will give a reference over the phone.

4. Avoid buying kit from the the people who recommend and support it. Watch out for those who start out by pitching an over specified server running unnecessarily complex and unfriendly software along with and a costly maintenance contract to look after it. Oh OK I’ll say it: Avoid Windows Small Business Server.

5. An interview will help you gauge their understanding of the needs of your business. A rough idea of their technical skills can be gauged by imposing the following short multiple choice test. Unless you are looking to take out a maintenance contract It’s reasonable you pay their standard rate to attending your interview and test. It’s not an approach a consultant will expect (it’s never happened to me). By all means blame this blog entry.

A Short PC Support Test

1. Windows stops dead mid way through booting, what is the most reasonable first step that may fix it?
a) Boot to a Windows CD in order to run chkdsk via the recovery console.
b) Try to boot to safe mode and if successful defragment.
c) Try to boot into safe mode and use disk management to set C: as an active disk.
d) Boot to a Windows CD in order to run msconfig via the recovery console.

2. A user complains their screen is expectantly covered in rows of rectangular coloured blobs. What is the most likely culprit?
a) The monitor is being asked to display a mode it does not support.
b) The monitor has failed.
c) The graphics card has suffered a hardware failure.
d) Windows plug and play decided to install the wrong graphics driver.

3. To set up a PC network share as drive letter, which option on the tools menu within XP or Vista’s Windows Explorer, would you use?
a) File sharing preferences...
b) Connect to shared
c) Map network drive
d) Share to drive letter

4. The local Static IP address 192.168.1.100 is used by a PC on Local Area Network. What is the likely reason?
a) The Windows File and Printer sharing wizard has been run.
b) A Firewall rule in the router is sending traffic to that machine.
c) The address has been to set to match that PCs Netmask settings.
d) The address was randomly chosen by The Windows IP stack.

5. What does this address: 127.0.0.1 refer to?
a) The address clients call when contacting a DHCP server.
b) The telnet address used by most routers.
c) The address used by routers to talk to other routers.
d) The machine itself, it is the loopback address.

6. What is xcopy?
a) An enhanced version of the command line/DOS copy command.
b) A tool to connect to a Unix / Linux file system.
c) A small application used to securely wipe a storage device.
d) A command that quickly halts the actions of the copy command.

7. Shared files and printers on a on XP PC are no longer available to other network users, which of these are likely causes?

a)
i. The current user is not logged in using an administrator account.
or
ii. The Microsoft QoS packet scheduler is not enabled.

b)
i. The guest account is disabled.
or
ii. Windows firewall has 'Do not allow exceptions' selected.

c)
i. The shared directories' attributes are set to read only.
or
ii. DNS settings are wrong.

d)
i. A shared directory has too many files in it.
or
ii. Another PC or device on the LAN is causing packet loss.


Answers

1. Answer is A. A fail here is very worrying, this should be the most common thing somebody fixing PCs does.

2. Answers is C. It is a fault condition an experienced consultant gets to see occasionally. Getting this right suggests some understanding of how PCs and displays actually work.

3. Answers is C. Basic stuff, they really should know this.

4. Answer is B.
5. Answer is D.
Get questions 4 or 5 wrong and I wouldn’t let you tinker with my network.

6. Answer is A. I’d be reassured if they get this right. Knowledge of the command line is not only very useful, it suggests they have poked about under the hood or like me have been using PCs before the Graphical User Interface offered the option to ignore DOS.

7. Answer is B. Windows File sharing failures are common. If the candidate doesn’t know this they not even Googling to find solutions to common problems. A fail in my book.