I have a confession to make. I'm a bit of a hardware pack rat. When you work computer support and are pulling boxes off of the line regularly, this quality can put you on a slippery slope. Maybe it was my upbringing, but I really hate discarding things that might be useful some day. I've gotten better about recycling periodically and reusing when appropriate but realistically I still hang on to more hardware than I'll ever be able to put to work.

My neighbor at the office and I have something we call Saucy Fridays. Whenever it's coming to the close of the week, and one of us feels like we're down to our last nerve, we'll warn the other by declaring "I'm having a Saucy Friday." It's a sign that we've had enough of our colleagues, and we're just one step away from snapping at some unfortunate who happens to blunder in and say the wrong thing.

Why indeed? On the team I work for I am often called upon to help with technical problems, despite the fact that I escaped from the help desk some years ago and went on the road. The usual reason given for calling me directly is that it is quicker to call me; this can be a bit of a bind if I am busy with a customer or driving to another call and can't give their problems my full attention. I can sometimes help but often ask them to call the Help desk, not because I wish to be unhelpful but because simply, it isn't my job guess at the reasons for system failures, given that I have no more access to system information than other members of the team.

Help desks should constantly strive to improve their methods of client interaction. Users must feel comfortable with the help desk and know they will receive prompt, courteous, and effective support. Here are 10 practices your help desk can use to strengthen user relations and improve client utilization. This information, which originally appeared as "Talking Shop: Convince users to utilize the help desk," is also available as a PDF download.

The help desk does not have to confine its activities to the traditional roles of reporting faults, password resets, change requests, software advice and so on. The great asset of the help desk is that it is manned during all working hours so that if any thing needs to be reported it can be done by the help desk, so why not make it the reporting point for building faults, a calling point for first aiders, booking training courses, even arranging to meet visitors in reception and guiding them to their meetings.

Valentine's Day is here in the U.S., and a conversation with some coworkers about the holiday got me reminiscing about how we celebrated when I was a child in school. Every year, I'd decorate a shoe box or a paper sack with construction paper and markers. This would serve as my mailbox. Then on the big day my classmates and I would shuffle around homeroom, sheepishly delivering our little cards.

Nobody has hired skywriters yet, but Microsoft intends to pull Windows XP from retail channels this June. We're not using Vista right now, so I'm considering laying in some spare XP licenses. Should you stock up, too? If your office is anything like mine, you've decided to stand pat with Windows XP, and hold off on a migration to Vista. Well, after June 30, unless you're placing an order of 25 machines or more, your OEM won't be able to pre-install XP for you anymore. Even if your purchase is large enough, your OEM still may not provide this service; it's entirely up to them.

I recently heard from a friend of mine who does tech support at another university. He's burnt out. In fact, he says in his email: "Work: I [expletive deleted] hate it." The things putting my pal under strain will sound familiar to many of you: an understaffed department, capricious managers and high-maintenance end users. The final straw came this holiday season, when my friend's manager allowed everyone else in the department to take vacation during Christmas week, leaving him as the only person manning the support line phones. My friend's the last tech standing on a campus of over twenty thousand students and faculty.

I don't like to be discriminatory, but some people don't have what it takes to provide computer support. Working the help desk takes rare hybrid of skills: customer service acumen and technical inquisitiveness. Not everyone can have these talents, as my landlord illustrates... The communal washers and dryers in my apartment building are kind of quirky. They're not old, just cantankerous. Occasionally, they stop working for no apparent reason. Sometimes, my fiancée and I have had them reject the tokens we've put in, and we'll have to walk down the street to the laundromat, carrying our wet laundry in our arms and grumbling all the while. Usually, we come home from our trip to the Wash and Fold only to hear the mechanical rumble that indicates one of our neighbors had no problem using their tokens. In those moments, Spring Breeze fabric softener can smell like defeat.

If I purchase one single license, does that permit me to backup files from one computer to two other computers, or do I have to purchase three licenses