We fix the glitches and rough edges of the PCs we use every day in-house ourselves, and keep a record of the work. This shows the grounded, hands-on way we approach technology as a company that plans, builds, and runs its own business systems in-house.
Because we plan, build, and run our own business systems in-house, we feel we should also take responsibility for the health of the PCs that run them. Rather than leaving small complaints such as "it's gotten slow," "it freezes," or "it's hard to use" unaddressed, we investigate the cause, fix it, and keep a record we can look back on. This accumulated experience carries straight over into our system-building and AI consulting work.
Even on PCs with plenty of memory installed, we sometimes saw a "low memory" message followed by the screen freezing. Investigating showed the cause wasn't the memory itself, but Windows' virtual memory (page file) setting being left too small.
After correcting the setting, we also built a mechanism that automatically frees up memory when it runs low, plus a way to temporarily pause unneeded software only when you want to focus on your work.
Looking only at "last opened date" isn't reliable, since things like antivirus scans can rewrite that date. So we built a way to tell which software is actually being used based on real launch records, and use it to help clean out old software.
We also identify and uninstall software that is not supported on Windows 11, and remove risky software such as anything whose support has ended.
None of these are flashy features, but we value chipping away at the small, everyday frustrations one at a time.
Plugging in a USB drive stopped opening its folder automatically the way it used to. Investigating showed that registry-cleaning software had wiped out Windows' own AutoPlay registration entries.
After restoring the original registration, we also built a fallback mechanism that reproduces the same behavior, so the same cause won't cause trouble again.
One day we suddenly couldn't log in to the free call/messaging app we normally use. Investigating showed we had kept using an old version that had fallen out of support, and automatic updates had also stopped because the distribution source had changed. We resolved it by reinstalling the latest version from the correct source.
We connect multiple in-house PCs via remote desktop and screen sharing, so we can help each other out even from a distance when something goes wrong. We also set up a way to wake a powered-off PC over the network.
Ads served through the browser kept popping up one after another, breaking our focus between tasks more than we expected. We now block these ads as well, so the PC stays comfortable to use.