Real IT from the Trenches#
I went from mechanical engineering and factory work to IT support, homelabs, scripting, and infrastructure.
This blog documents that transition without pretending everything went smoothly — including mistakes, troubleshooting, and lessons learned along the way.
Because real IT is chaotic.
And honestly, that’s exactly what made me love it.
If you’re trying to break into IT, building a homelab, or learning new technologies, I hope some of the things I share here will help you avoid at least a few of the mistakes I made myself.
Reports from the Trenches #004 — CPU Stuck at 0.40 GHz — The Story of One Dell TL;DR A Dell Latitude 5300 became painfully slow.
Task Manager showed CPU usage around 90–94%, but the real issue was much stranger.
The processor was locked at around 0.39–0.40 GHz.
After updating the BIOS, drivers, and disabling problematic Windows Power Throttling behaviour, the laptop returned to normal performance.
Problem The user reported that the laptop was practically unusable.
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Reports from the Trenches #003 — Outlook Was Innocent TL;DR User reported Outlook running slowly, typing lag, and Word freezing.
At first it looked like a classic Office issue or a corrupted Outlook profile.
During troubleshooting, however, the following surfaced:
USBXHCI LiveKernelEvent 144, WATCHDOG errors, USB controller instability, outdated drivers and firmware, Intel Graphics instability under a three-monitor workload. Only after analysing the dumps in WinDbg did the real problem emerge:
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TL;DR After a password reset through JumpCloud, Outlook, Teams, Cloudflare Access, and other desktop applications on macOS stopped authenticating correctly.
Browser access continued working normally, which initially made the issue look like a Microsoft 365 or Conditional Access problem.
The actual root cause was a corrupted macOS Keychain that failed to synchronise with the new login password.
Recreating the Keychain resolved the issue completely.
Quick Fix If Microsoft 365 apps on macOS keep asking for credentials after a password reset:
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TL;DR User was suddenly signed out from all Microsoft 365 applications after a BitLocker recovery event.
Outlook, Teams, and Office started throwing a 7q6ch authentication error, while browser access continued working normally.
The device itself was still healthy and properly joined to Entra ID.
The issue was resolved by re-authenticating the Work or School account after signing back into Windows using the Other user option.
The Symptoms User reported:
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