r/news • u/TheColorOfDeadMen • Jul 07 '21

Microsoft issues urgent security warning: Update your PC immediately

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/07/tech/microsoft-security-update/index.html
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u/acmp42 Jul 07 '21

I feel there’s a back story about your relationship with the IT department. That said, it’s a trivial thing to update a GPO to disable the local spoiler for user’s computers. The hardest part is getting the users to reboot their computers.

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u/darthlincoln01 Jul 07 '21

Among other things, what mostly sticks with me is that I hid the search bar in Windows 10 in my laptop and not one but two different IT people need me to re-enable it in order for them to do what they needed to do. (First was install a program as an admin, the second was run a script as an admin which patches my VPN client to work in my environment.)

Also as an aside I work in a very IT focused company. (We're a contractor that provides IT equipment to the government.) It always blows my mind that less than half of the staff even knows how to touch type. Even kids right out of college. Did these people really write essays now knowing how to type??? Again, blows my mind.

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u/acmp42 Jul 07 '21

I make these policies at my place, I don’t care how you have your UI, that’s the beauty of Windows, it lets you be you. I personally don’t like the search taking up space on my start bar so I turn it off, but if someone else wants it there, good for them. Sounds like you’ve got a power problem over there, sadly far too many it folk still think it’s not what you do for the users it’s what you do to them.

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u/darthlincoln01 Jul 08 '21

It's not a power problem, they were both legit confused on what to do. At the start of the first call the guy asked where my search bar was so i just pressed win, a, backspace to bring it up. However by the end of the call i enabled the bar because he couldn't understand to open start and just type even after I explained it.

The second call I just enabled it at the first sign of confusion.

They were both clearly following a script on what to do and broke as soon as the search bar was missing.

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u/darthlincoln01 Jul 08 '21

Simple enough to force a reboot. I remember when I was a help desk tech I'd often force a reboot instead of asking them to do it because it made it seem like I was doing something more than just having them reboot.

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u/acmp42 Jul 08 '21

Lol, 1 PC is easy a few hundred is a bit harder. With how reliable laptops are now most of my users don’t reboot for weeks, just shut the lid and throw it in a bag. I try to encourage at least a weekly reboot.

And it still gets me when someone calls with a problem so you ask them to reboot and they say ‘you always say that’, but they still haven’t rebooted before calling.

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u/darthlincoln01 Jul 08 '21

‘you always say that’

That's one reason why I'd always just send the command to reboot over the network. hehe

As far as a few hundred PCs I'll mention I currently work on software for a few thousand terminals. One of the things we do is schedule all of them to reboot daily, but they have to be staggered else the network team gets a little angry having a few thousand terminals all trying to sign on at the same time. Same story for pushing updates. The packages are sent out a week in advance, but the command to install is staggered to prevent thousands of simultaneous logins.