In between the enterprise, with its hundreds or thousands of PCs, and the consumer/SOHO with one or two, lurks the small business.
These companies typically have enough computers to be a problem for their IT staff (if indeed they have any), but not enough revenue to justify many of the management
niceties that help enterprise IT operations keep systems humming. They probably don’t have standard images, or even own imaging software, but simply buy machines with the operating system installed and add whatever other software is required manually. They may not even have database inventory systems.
If they buy white boxes rather than brand-name PCs, the challenges become even more interesting. If a machine is having tantrums, and the IT person determines the only recourse is to reformat the hard drive and rebuild the system, how do they find all of the right drivers?
Chances are the company computer collection varies wildly in age, and therefore in components. All machines may have a particular brand of NIC or video card, for example, but the model will vary. Chances are any disks that came with the machines have been chucked into a box somewhere, and there’s no easy way of matching them with the vintage systems.
Although Windows can sense and cope with much of the installed hardware, often drivers for problem devices are not easily tracked down — things like specialized AGP drivers for motherboards, or funky audio or video drivers that can be difficult to identify and source.
Opening the system and peering at the various items will sometime generate enough information (and a lot of sneezing — how do those dust bunnies get so big?) for a Web search. What would really be useful, however, is a sticker on the back of the PC that tells the buyer exactly what’s in it.
That way, the customer can go driver-hunting easily, and with a reasonable expectation of ending up with a properly-functioning computer.
It shouldn’t be that hard for a reseller to generate these stickers (they could also contain serial numbers and manufacturing dates). If they already have a database for warranty tracking, the information could live there.
It would help the reseller as well. A few years ago, a particular model of disk drive was having major problems (an up to eighty percent failure rate), and our reseller, who did track the components he used in each system, was able to identify affected machines quickly and do some proactive swapping before his customers suffered. It won him lots of Brownie points with his clients, and turned a potential disaster into something that generated more business.
A friend went through the opposite scenario recently. He had to rebuild a corrupted PC, and although his reseller knew in general terms what the components were, my friend ultimately opened the box to determine the exact model of each piece so he could hunt down the appropriate drivers.
With an annoyed and impatient user breathing down his neck, asking for a functioning machine, he did not need that extra step!
He was lucky — the reseller of the system was still around, and ultimately did send over the all-important motherboard disk, once they were told what it was.