I was going to make this a whine, but the aggravation that it's causing has boosted it to at least a minor rant and may take it all the way to full on rant before I'm done. I was apparently using a very old model laptop from my company, and it was really struggling to perform my daily tasks, so I asked for and received an upgraded model. Unfortunately, it seems that IT support from my company has really gone down hill since I started working for them a year and a half ago. The last time I got a computer, way back when I started, all I had to do was walk in to work, plug in to the company's corporate network, set the computer identity up on the network, and away I went. This time, not so much. This time all they did before handing me the computer was establish an Admin account on the computer. They didn't even bother updating the drivers, or running Windows Update. I had 75 Windows Updates to download and install yesterday, and I've had to, quite literally, update every single driver on this computer, including the chipset drivers, and had to flash the BIOS.
It was so bad that I couldn't even get the computer to recognize a VGA monitor either when the computer was docked, or when I plugged the monitor directly into the side of the laptop, because it was using "Generic VGA Graphics Driver" as the graphics driver. The stupid thing didn't even recognize that it had onboard Intel graphics, and then had to have the chipset drivers updated before I could update the graphics driver just to get the stupid system to recognize that I'd plugged a monitor into it.
Now, I have the tech background for all of this to be no problem whatsoever, but that's not what I get paid to do, and someone else does get paid to do it, but isn't doing it. Not only that, but the factory settings are so restrictive that I have to sign in with Admin privileges just to delete an icon off the desktop, and I'm fairly certain that this level of restriction is what's preventing the corporate IT solutions from being able to automatically install all of the software upgrades that are required for me to keep my computer on the network, and you know, to communicate with anyone else in the company. I've spent the last two days trying to get this damn thing set up.