User: Do you have a bigger computer available?
Me: Bigger?
User: More powerful. I need a more powerful computer to run this application. It keeps crashing out on me.
Me: Well, we currently have 0 spare computers.
User: Oh, uh. Well I haven’t been able to work since around 11AM.
(It’s currently 4PM)
Me: Give me a few. I’ll look into the problem and maybe we can give you a virtual machine to work off of so you can just remote into it and run your program from there.
User: OK. So, what should I be doing right now? Or should I just go back to my desk and wait?
Me: Yeah, I’ll be researching the issue from here and I’ll let you know when I can setup a virtual machine for you.

I emailed my boss asking which virtual server I should use and if he already had an image setup for the users to use as that would save me a crap-load (technical term) of time.
Then started checking into the machine that we gave to this user.
Eventviewer was fine with the exception of the application the user was using showing several crashes.
I load up the application just fine on my machine, but I don’t have the credentials to access the database the user needs to access, so I can’t verify when the crashes took place.
I email the user asking for their account information and asked if the application would crash on startup or after a query.

Roughly 10 minutes later, the user walks over to my desk with laptop in hand.
User: I was told to go home for now and to give this to you. I think that the system needs more RAM or something as I checked it out and I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. It’s kinda small like a netbook so maybe it is underpowered. But you probably know more about the computer than I do.
Me: Yeah I’ll look into it.
User: OK, see you tomorrow.
Me: Bye.

Just for reference, it’s a Dell Inspiron 1440 with a Pentium Dual-Core 2.0GHz and 2GB RAM. It’s running Windows 7 64-bit.

I then email the user’s boss asking for a test account to get to the database. The boss responds within a minute with the credential information. So then I email the user’s co-worker/trainer asking for information on what queries the user was running to generate errors. I have yet to hear back.

Good thing it’s almost 5PM…