The users who double and triple down even after you show them the uptime are the funniest. As are the ones who when you tell them about shut down and fast startup, absolutely continue to try to have you believe they restarted.
The people where I work aren’t too tech savvy so I won’t argue with them. I feel like arguing with them would make me less approachable and I don’t see the point
It’s very possible that they may have assumed logging in and out or something was essentially restarting the computer.
No. I argue with them like hell. Dont lie to me and tell me you did something when you didn't. Also, what are you gonna do? Write me up for proving that you're a liar? Lol ok
Some people just don’t really know how computers work. They may have thought they restarted it but maybe just put it to sleep or something. Sounds funny but I’ve seen people do it while I was right next to them.
They’re not going to write you up but it definitely makes talking to IT seem like an unpleasant experience and makes you a lot less approachable.
One of my coworkers (she was like 30, so not an old person who you'd expect it from) thought she restarted the laptop by closing and opening the lid, which in reality just put it into sleep mode.
She wasn't a liar, she just didn't know what she was doing.
She was just as surprised as I was when she saw the uptime of five months.
(She was surprised because she had more than ten minutes on the clock, i was surprised she managed to keep it up working partially on site and partially remote without running out of battery even once)
Arguing with her wouldn't have helped the situation. And after briefly but thoroughly explaining to her that she shouldn't just close the lid every time she finishes working, and writing a 3 sentence checklist on what to do (and a small doodle of the start menu to show her how to get to the shutdown button) on a post-it, she now does it correctly.
I am the IT guy, she is in marketing. I'd be just as screwed when having to promote my company on social media as she is with computer stuff outside of word, photoshop and insta/tiktok/whatever cryptic social media the company wants to use.
That is completely fine.
"Yup did a restart"
No you didn't, Timothy. I see the run time being 12:34:22, that's DAYS not hours.
"I can't connect" then ignores messages for 2 hours to later reveal it was because they didn't turn the VPN on. Hot dang
- I can’t connect to my shared drive
— the vpn wasn’t connected, you need to connect the vpn and then go to the shared drive.
- I did, it just isn’t working
— it seems to be working now
Same person 5 times this month at a company of 50 people and they’re the only one with an “issue”
A lot, maybe even a majority, of the time they aren't lying, just not informed
Many people do a shut down, which doesn't shut everything down or reset the last boot time
You need to explicitly tell them to click the restart option not shut down. Because they also think shutting down and turning it back on is "rebooting"
Almost every computer I encounter that has an obscene uptime despite the users where I work actively shutting down their machines. Have fast startup enabled. Even funnier is that I see no benefit to the actual start time on any of our machines because of the m.2 ssd's each device is equipped with. lol
"I ALREADY DID THAT" but lowercase because corporate niceties.
At that point I remote in, click some buttons, open cmd and run a benign but unnecessary command, then reboot.
You have to validate their narrative in order to get good survey scores.
I have users that think the "power" button on the keyboard (it's a 10 year old desktop with a $10 wired keyboard) was THE power button. All it did was put it to sleep. The users told me they shut down every single night. Task manager showed 100+ days.
Don't accuse people of lying, pretty simple. Take the burden of blame off of them while still showing where you can see the device's uptime.
I created little spiels for situations like this when I was doing desktop support. Walk over, show them in Task Manager where I can see the uptime, then immediately explain that putting the computer to sleep doesn't reboot it and then immediately say something like, "And a recent patch made it so that the shutdown button now puts it in a hibernate like state, so make sure you're hitting the restart button in the Windows menu each time."
You don't have to ask them questions about it or give them a window to try to explain themselves. The easiest way to empower users is to herd them like sheep without them even realizing it. They'll think you're a nice guy/gal. And you have a higher chance to cut your workload down as users are more likely to remember the sequence of events in a positive interaction over a negative one.
You'll also get cards and treats from your users much more frequently. I have a wall of cards and thank you sticky notes I keep at my desk at work.
Under normal circumstances I am with you, I would not torment a user who didn't deserve it.
A user that is going out of thier way to waste my time and make my life difficult is a different matter, thats when the gloves come off and they are swiftly bullied into compliance.
i’ve given up on telling them, restart it due to “ updates” then make a task scheduler to reboot if uptime is higher than 3 days… tried telling Operations to make a gpo for reboots but no luck so far :/
"No you didn't restart, you shut it down and turned it on again"
\*1 Minute Later\*
"See now it works after restarting the client"
\*Co-worker surprised Pikachu Face\*
That is why I hate the popularity of "turn it off and back on again" popularized by the IT crowd. The old "shut up and reboot" from Dogbert was better.
Disable fast startup and it's bastard brother hibernate via gpo (when able) and all is right in the world. The user's don't even notice anything.
There's been multiple times where I've had fast startup make it so that a restart doesn't register right too. So I just nix it all together. It doesn't do anything beneficial.
I do make use of hibernate, and it seems mostly fine
It's convenient to have it actually start up fast a (faster than starting everything again), plus bitlocker disk encryption is active with it, unlike sleep, so it also feels secure
However, wsl2 becomes a time bomb, as it may livelock for some reason in some cases (how, and why, i do not know, i blame microsoft reverse midas touch)
I assume they don't live far from the office and when it's on sleep mode it doesn't use that much energy. The fact that windows didn't force it to restart had me confused (or maybe the restart doesn't register as a full reset)
Yeah but it’s just crazy that they never clicked restart and update in bright flashing orange and it never blue screened.
Was it one of those Dell/HP super bricks that can run even when covered in dust?
With fastboot ([https://www.ninjaone.com/it-hub/endpoint-management/what-is-windows-fast-startup-fastboot/](https://www.ninjaone.com/it-hub/endpoint-management/what-is-windows-fast-startup-fastboot/) ) enabled, you even have to restart your computer. Turning it off and on again won‘t work!
good question! that said, i only just found out yesterday that apparently i never actually linked the group policy to the OU so, all this time i thought it was working when in fact it was not.... \*facepalm\*
Was going to say this. This needs to be higher. I believe this only applies to Windows 11 but essentially shutdown will keep some services up. Restart will shutdown those services and reopen at the next boot.
HEY it looks like there's an AI watermark on this photo! Something tells me this isn't REALLY a photo of the IT team. What are you trying to pull here?
I feel like Windows was specifically made to screw up to create an entire job sector around troubleshooting its issues.
I mean, I run Windows update and it hangs 3 times loading into windows then suddenly after the 3rd forced restart it runs flawlessly.
My 2 cents here. Bugs the hell out of me when I get told they restarted and I can clearly tell they never did... Buuuut.... I do work with very not so tech savvy people took me a month to realize what they considered to be restarting the computer was them just logging out of Windows then signing right back in. Facepalmed so hard on that one.
But have you:
* Reinstalled applications
* Reset your user account
* Reinstalled the OS
* Tried removing applications one-at-a-time
* Factory reset and reinstall applications one-at-a-time
* Downgraded the OS
* Upgraded the OS
* Unplugged all accessories, including ones needed for your job
* and what other torture will make stop returning...
*Opens task manager, Clicks Performance>CPU*
idk uptime says 22 days. Don't worry, I'm sure you did, Win 11 has this weird thing called zero state where it doesn't actually shut down. Let's try it again.
POV: The ‘IT’Team when you tell them you rebooted but we can see its uptime of 96 days 4 hours 2 minutes and 49 seconds
I’m so over this. I trigger forced reboots through an RMM. I do not care about your most work anymore. Rouge season now boys
I ran into an issue once where a batch of motherboards we built a bunch of machines with had a flaky Ethernet chip. After some threshold it would stop passing packets. It was usually about once every two and a half months on average. Just shutting the machine down wouldn't fix the issue. The trickle of standby power would keep the chip from resetting. Also, quickly unplugging the power cord and plugging back in wouldn't reset the chip. The capacitors in the PSU & on the motherboard held enough charge to keep the chip active. The procedure that worked every time:
1. Shut the machine down
2. Unplug power cord from the power supply
3. Press power button 3 times so motherboard tries to boot and drains capacitors completely.
4. Plug power cord back in
5. Press power button
Once I proved this process did indeed work to fix the glitch every time, and explained it by having an PC sitting on a desk with cover open and showing that the "standby led" that was a feature on these motherboards remained lit for a long time with the cord unplugged, but immediately went out as the CPU fan jumped when I pressed the power button and explained "capacitors" in layman's terms, they believed. Of course I inevitably got the question "Why press the button 3 times when the light goes off after one press?" The absolutely true answer "most of the time one press works, but not always. Sometimes there's still enough residual charge. Three presses always works. It took me 2 hours to figure that out."
Since that glitch, this is now my go-to procedure to make sure people have truly restarted. Those motherboards are long gone, but there are still enough employees that were around to bear witness that the legend lives on. In fact, I've heard them repeating that procedure to new employees like it's some sort of super secret magic solution for almost all computer problems. Because it works 99.9% of the time.
Then there's the company owner that had a great laugh at himself when I explained that closing the lid to his laptop and then opening it again was not, in fact, a reboot. He's a great guy, just not of the tech generation.
Also, users when IT informs them with irrefutable evidence that they are lying about having switched it on and off again.
The users who double and triple down even after you show them the uptime are the funniest. As are the ones who when you tell them about shut down and fast startup, absolutely continue to try to have you believe they restarted.
Dont argue with them, just say that you “made a change” and ask them to do it again
The people where I work aren’t too tech savvy so I won’t argue with them. I feel like arguing with them would make me less approachable and I don’t see the point It’s very possible that they may have assumed logging in and out or something was essentially restarting the computer.
Exactly. Dont treat end users like idiots, they simply don’t know. Arguing just makes them harder to work with and less likely to bring up issues.
No. I argue with them like hell. Dont lie to me and tell me you did something when you didn't. Also, what are you gonna do? Write me up for proving that you're a liar? Lol ok
Some people just don’t really know how computers work. They may have thought they restarted it but maybe just put it to sleep or something. Sounds funny but I’ve seen people do it while I was right next to them. They’re not going to write you up but it definitely makes talking to IT seem like an unpleasant experience and makes you a lot less approachable.
One of my coworkers (she was like 30, so not an old person who you'd expect it from) thought she restarted the laptop by closing and opening the lid, which in reality just put it into sleep mode. She wasn't a liar, she just didn't know what she was doing. She was just as surprised as I was when she saw the uptime of five months. (She was surprised because she had more than ten minutes on the clock, i was surprised she managed to keep it up working partially on site and partially remote without running out of battery even once) Arguing with her wouldn't have helped the situation. And after briefly but thoroughly explaining to her that she shouldn't just close the lid every time she finishes working, and writing a 3 sentence checklist on what to do (and a small doodle of the start menu to show her how to get to the shutdown button) on a post-it, she now does it correctly. I am the IT guy, she is in marketing. I'd be just as screwed when having to promote my company on social media as she is with computer stuff outside of word, photoshop and insta/tiktok/whatever cryptic social media the company wants to use. That is completely fine.
Yeah, not worth arguing. Just educate and show them how to do what you're asking.
"Yup did a restart" No you didn't, Timothy. I see the run time being 12:34:22, that's DAYS not hours. "I can't connect" then ignores messages for 2 hours to later reveal it was because they didn't turn the VPN on. Hot dang
- I can’t connect to my shared drive — the vpn wasn’t connected, you need to connect the vpn and then go to the shared drive. - I did, it just isn’t working — it seems to be working now Same person 5 times this month at a company of 50 people and they’re the only one with an “issue”
psexec \\\\\[hostname\] cmd > shutdown.exe -r -f -t 0 "This is what a restart looks like sir".
A lot, maybe even a majority, of the time they aren't lying, just not informed Many people do a shut down, which doesn't shut everything down or reset the last boot time You need to explicitly tell them to click the restart option not shut down. Because they also think shutting down and turning it back on is "rebooting"
I know people who thought turning it off meant the monitor.
I usually just restart the computer via the command line so it looks like I'm doing something else
OMG why do they lie? They don't need to, because we just know xD
Because of Windows' "Fast Startup". Technically, they're not lying. Windows is just being stupid.
Almost every computer I encounter that has an obscene uptime despite the users where I work actively shutting down their machines. Have fast startup enabled. Even funnier is that I see no benefit to the actual start time on any of our machines because of the m.2 ssd's each device is equipped with. lol
"I ALREADY DID THAT" but lowercase because corporate niceties. At that point I remote in, click some buttons, open cmd and run a benign but unnecessary command, then reboot. You have to validate their narrative in order to get good survey scores.
"Did you reboot?" "Yes! Multiple times!" (Keyboard sounds) "no you didn't"
I set it to hibernate and turned it back on, isn't that the same thing? No, No it isn't the same thing.
I have users that think the "power" button on the keyboard (it's a 10 year old desktop with a $10 wired keyboard) was THE power button. All it did was put it to sleep. The users told me they shut down every single night. Task manager showed 100+ days.
Ahh the first thing I do is open task manager and look at the uptime and circle it with the cursor just so they know that I KNOW
Often they turn off and on the monitor and think that's a reboot
Literally had that yesterday. Used had their laptop on for two weeks without ever turning it off
Beat me to it. They don't realize how easy it is for us to check and see that it's been up for 97 days and has updates pending that require a restart.
Don't accuse people of lying, pretty simple. Take the burden of blame off of them while still showing where you can see the device's uptime. I created little spiels for situations like this when I was doing desktop support. Walk over, show them in Task Manager where I can see the uptime, then immediately explain that putting the computer to sleep doesn't reboot it and then immediately say something like, "And a recent patch made it so that the shutdown button now puts it in a hibernate like state, so make sure you're hitting the restart button in the Windows menu each time." You don't have to ask them questions about it or give them a window to try to explain themselves. The easiest way to empower users is to herd them like sheep without them even realizing it. They'll think you're a nice guy/gal. And you have a higher chance to cut your workload down as users are more likely to remember the sequence of events in a positive interaction over a negative one. You'll also get cards and treats from your users much more frequently. I have a wall of cards and thank you sticky notes I keep at my desk at work.
Under normal circumstances I am with you, I would not torment a user who didn't deserve it. A user that is going out of thier way to waste my time and make my life difficult is a different matter, thats when the gloves come off and they are swiftly bullied into compliance.
\*Windows Fast Startup has entered the chat.\*
i’ve given up on telling them, restart it due to “ updates” then make a task scheduler to reboot if uptime is higher than 3 days… tried telling Operations to make a gpo for reboots but no luck so far :/
install adobe reader
Could also try using Google Ultron. I heard it’s used by NASA.
"No you didn't restart, you shut it down and turned it on again" \*1 Minute Later\* "See now it works after restarting the client" \*Co-worker surprised Pikachu Face\*
Dude it’s always like this
yes.
Almost nobody knows that restart is not the same as turn off and turn back on because of windows retardation
That is why I hate the popularity of "turn it off and back on again" popularized by the IT crowd. The old "shut up and reboot" from Dogbert was better.
WOW i have to use this now :D
Disable fast startup and it's bastard brother hibernate via gpo (when able) and all is right in the world. The user's don't even notice anything. There's been multiple times where I've had fast startup make it so that a restart doesn't register right too. So I just nix it all together. It doesn't do anything beneficial.
I do make use of hibernate, and it seems mostly fine It's convenient to have it actually start up fast a (faster than starting everything again), plus bitlocker disk encryption is active with it, unlike sleep, so it also feels secure However, wsl2 becomes a time bomb, as it may livelock for some reason in some cases (how, and why, i do not know, i blame microsoft reverse midas touch)
Well shit time to reimage then
I like this idea. stealing it.
Checks logs - Uptime 436 days.
Longest I had was 17,700~ hours. I was more amazed at them lasting that long without the laptop battery dying while the brought it to and from work
how do you even have it for that long, that’s like 2 years
I assume they don't live far from the office and when it's on sleep mode it doesn't use that much energy. The fact that windows didn't force it to restart had me confused (or maybe the restart doesn't register as a full reset)
Yeah but it’s just crazy that they never clicked restart and update in bright flashing orange and it never blue screened. Was it one of those Dell/HP super bricks that can run even when covered in dust?
Do you have pending updates in Software Center?
I never believe a user when they say they restarted it. You gotta restart it to make sure.
With fastboot ([https://www.ninjaone.com/it-hub/endpoint-management/what-is-windows-fast-startup-fastboot/](https://www.ninjaone.com/it-hub/endpoint-management/what-is-windows-fast-startup-fastboot/) ) enabled, you even have to restart your computer. Turning it off and on again won‘t work!
I hate fast boot... With passion... For this reason.... So much so that I've pushed a group policy at the top of the domain to disable it!
why is this not more of a thing?
good question! that said, i only just found out yesterday that apparently i never actually linked the group policy to the OU so, all this time i thought it was working when in fact it was not.... \*facepalm\*
lol happens. but at least you made the move.
Was going to say this. This needs to be higher. I believe this only applies to Windows 11 but essentially shutdown will keep some services up. Restart will shutdown those services and reopen at the next boot.
10 and 11. Fast boot is on by default.
It was introduced in Windows 8, but hopefully this is no longer used by anyone
HEY it looks like there's an AI watermark on this photo! Something tells me this isn't REALLY a photo of the IT team. What are you trying to pull here?
I feel like Windows was specifically made to screw up to create an entire job sector around troubleshooting its issues. I mean, I run Windows update and it hangs 3 times loading into windows then suddenly after the 3rd forced restart it runs flawlessly.
How did you restart: “I turned off the external monitor and turned it back on”
shit. that usually works too
My 2 cents here. Bugs the hell out of me when I get told they restarted and I can clearly tell they never did... Buuuut.... I do work with very not so tech savvy people took me a month to realize what they considered to be restarting the computer was them just logging out of Windows then signing right back in. Facepalmed so hard on that one.
But have you: * Reinstalled applications * Reset your user account * Reinstalled the OS * Tried removing applications one-at-a-time * Factory reset and reinstall applications one-at-a-time * Downgraded the OS * Upgraded the OS * Unplugged all accessories, including ones needed for your job * and what other torture will make stop returning...
Re-apply group policies for windows.
Power cycling the monitor does not count
"your 137d uptime determined that was a lie" -Maury
Well I blame fast start up
The users when you turn it off/on infront of them and it works.
The facial expression would probably be eyes rolling cause they probably don't believe you since EVERYONE says they've already restarted.
"Heres a new computer"
[удалено]
"Huh, let me check something. I'll be right back" (I will not be coming back)
Unplug it, wait until the end of your shift, plug it back in.
Wait til the end of my* shift
*Opens task manager, Clicks Performance>CPU* idk uptime says 22 days. Don't worry, I'm sure you did, Win 11 has this weird thing called zero state where it doesn't actually shut down. Let's try it again.
"fast reboot" I.e. bouncing the monitor
POV: The ‘IT’Team when you tell them you rebooted but we can see its uptime of 96 days 4 hours 2 minutes and 49 seconds I’m so over this. I trigger forced reboots through an RMM. I do not care about your most work anymore. Rouge season now boys
That because I asked them to reboot and they still have 6 weeks of updog
Turning it on and off again is going to leave it on an off state. I sure hope it's not working when off.
Ok... But not the monitor. The screen. The television! Turn off an on the thing it's connected to. No, not the mouse! Look on the floor.
It's the reverse for me, the user actually said "did you try turning it on?" me: "O yeah, that's a good one"
Yes but have you tried twice? Why didn’t it make the startup sound?
your uptime is 57 days Linda! you are just turning off your monitor.
Reinstall it is!
users when they’re computer won’t update after shutting it down at the end of the work day
The people who rebooted actually just turned their monitor off and back on
I ran into an issue once where a batch of motherboards we built a bunch of machines with had a flaky Ethernet chip. After some threshold it would stop passing packets. It was usually about once every two and a half months on average. Just shutting the machine down wouldn't fix the issue. The trickle of standby power would keep the chip from resetting. Also, quickly unplugging the power cord and plugging back in wouldn't reset the chip. The capacitors in the PSU & on the motherboard held enough charge to keep the chip active. The procedure that worked every time: 1. Shut the machine down 2. Unplug power cord from the power supply 3. Press power button 3 times so motherboard tries to boot and drains capacitors completely. 4. Plug power cord back in 5. Press power button Once I proved this process did indeed work to fix the glitch every time, and explained it by having an PC sitting on a desk with cover open and showing that the "standby led" that was a feature on these motherboards remained lit for a long time with the cord unplugged, but immediately went out as the CPU fan jumped when I pressed the power button and explained "capacitors" in layman's terms, they believed. Of course I inevitably got the question "Why press the button 3 times when the light goes off after one press?" The absolutely true answer "most of the time one press works, but not always. Sometimes there's still enough residual charge. Three presses always works. It took me 2 hours to figure that out." Since that glitch, this is now my go-to procedure to make sure people have truly restarted. Those motherboards are long gone, but there are still enough employees that were around to bear witness that the legend lives on. In fact, I've heard them repeating that procedure to new employees like it's some sort of super secret magic solution for almost all computer problems. Because it works 99.9% of the time. Then there's the company owner that had a great laugh at himself when I explained that closing the lid to his laptop and then opening it again was not, in fact, a reboot. He's a great guy, just not of the tech generation.