Man trust me you may not have one but I can tell this you damn BDE and BN CMDR will fucking have one so will the damn CSM's and officer you run into, we were told we could only talk on the phone for 20 minutes three times a week but man everytime you looked around who in the hell did you see on the phones talking for hours to thier wives back home and they would take up joe's time on the phone also and come up with some bullshit excusse for it, I would tell them to pound it up thier ass and take one, man I tell you the higher up's come up with some of themost stupided ass rule and then they are the one's that brake them.

Quoted: Quoted: i'm sorry your IT personel are not up to par....i'm at the Department of the Army level and i'm a contractor.  maybe the computer related MOSs should be re-evaluated if the troops are coming out of AIT w/ their heads up their asses??  sorry to hear your IT dept. is so screwed.   I was under the impression you were prior service - I am starting to gather you were not.  There are no computer MOSs until you get to Division level - then you have some guys in G-6 to make the CG's stuff work pretty and maintainers in CSSAMO to keep the ULLS-S4, ULLS-G, SAMS, SAAS, etc. systems running.  If the Army was serious about administrative computers, we would have computer NCOs at every battalion - like we have maintencance NCOs for everything else -and a warrant officer job created for brigade level.

Adam_White- Styk and I were both Army Signal guys.  I think that's where the misunderstanding is coming from.

I'll speak for myself, but I know I came from an entirely different unit than you.  I was in a small signal battalion under USASOC on Ft. Bragg. We had 2 line companies.  Each with 2 squads of Sys Admin/Net Admin types (the old 74 series, I don't know if it changed recently).  Each squad had 5-10 SA/NAs in it.  When I deployed, the 3rd/5th/7th Group guys had their own networking people too.  I'm not sure what they were (31U/31C??)  

All of our guys had an interest (internet, emails, and games) with keeping our machines running.  So if a computer broke or wasn't working properly, we fixed it.  I did SATCOM, but I still helped the guys repair their machines and connections.  

What I'm getting at is it doesn't have to be your "job" to fix that crap.  Get creative.  If you have someone who knows a thing or two about computers, have them look after you stuff.  Give them some "perks" for doing it.  Take them off of guard duty/Staff Duty/KP whatever it takes to get them to fix those old POS computers.  If you don't know anyone, get some training yourself.  You gotta have someone under you who knows how to defrag a freaking hard drive.

It sucks that you even have to worry about that stuff.  With all this commercialization going on, it should be fixed pretty soon.  Just give it about 10 years, and us civvies will have everything running for ya.


CHRIS

Issue Date: September 06, 2004

CPO Shopper
Can your laptop take the desert dust and heat?

Listen up.
A reader asked for pointers on choosing a laptop to send to her son in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

If the main purpose for the laptop is to communicate with folks back home over the Internet, there’s an important and obvious question to ask before buying: Does the soldier, sailor, airman or Marine have access to the Internet?

Troops in Iraq are buying laptops — since February, about 26,000 of them, according to Judd Anstey, a spokesman for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service.

But “there’s not an Internet infrastructure there. It’s difficult to get a connection,” said John Harlow, co-founder and executive director of Freedom Calls Foundation. “Think about that before you decide to get a laptop. [The troops] are not really supposed to connect to the military system for personal stuff.”

Harlow’s foundation is a consortium of technology groups that donate equipment and technology to give troops free Internet communication in Iraq. That includes Internet phone calls, Internet access and video conferencing.

He said he gets calls from people all the time, asking for laptop suggestions, but people in the United States don’t realize how limited Internet access is in the war zone.

“That’s why our facility has about 1,500 people a day in it — they have to go there to access the Internet,” Harlow said.

Freedom Calls is working to open more facilities, with a goal of accommodating 50,000 a day. The foundation’s only current facility is at Camp Cooke, north of Baghdad.

Even there, troops can’t bring in their own laptops to get on the Internet. “We can’t allow people to come in and just connect to our network, because we have to keep our networks secure,” Harlow said.

Communicating, however, isn’t the only purpose for a laptop. Troops use them to play DVDs, keep journals and handle other activities. Whatever the intended use, Harlow has pointers for people thinking of buying one.

The heat and harsh conditions in the desert are tough on any laptop, he said. The dust, grit and sand get into everything. A solid case is important, and it’s vital to keep it clean. His top two choices for that environment are Hewlett Packard and Dell notebooks. His company has used the Hewlett Packard ZD7000 series for the last four months and found them durable, made with a lot of metal.

“Only one has had to come back, and someone had spilled coffee on that one,” he said.

Laptops in that series vary in price from about $1,200 to a $1,700 model that plays DVDs and has other bells and whistles.

Some laptops are advertised to be so tough you can drop them. That’s not the primary issue in Iraq, Harlow noted. You could accidentally drop a laptop at Fort Lewis, Wash., and do just as much damage as you would in Iraq. The grit and dust are a bigger issue.

These “tough” laptops are “low-tech,” Harlow said, noting that you could pay three times as much for a machine with half the technology, as well as a much smaller screen.

The military exchanges sell Hewlett Packard, Dell and other brands of laptops in their stores (to include Iraq), as well as online at www.aafes.com, www.navy-nex.com, www.usmc-mccs.com and www.cg-exchange.com.

;;;;The online exchange catalogs include laptops in the Hewlett Packard ZD7000 series, which Harlow recommends.

If you’re shipping a laptop to Iraq, insure the package. There have been instances of mail being rifled through or never arriving.

When Freedom Calls Foundation ships equipment to Iraq, it always uses an overnight shipping service that delivers to all the camps.

“It’s door to door, and they treat it right,” Harlow said. They’ve had no problems with stolen or damaged equipment.

Depending upon what the unit officers are like I have heard of guys getting online regularly using Army computers in the TOCs.

GunLvr