Sysadmin Cured A Medical Mystery By Shifting A Single Cable
The Register, Friday, August 15th, 2025
Few make it to Friday without some end-of-week blues, which The Register always treats with a fresh dose of On Call - the reader-contributed column that recounts your stories of tech support contusions. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as 'Jake' who told us of the time he worked as the sole sysadmin for an entire hospital.
Jake's job focused on classic information technology, but in the story that he sent to On Call medicos summoned him to investigate a malfunctioning CT scanner. Such machines connect to large and powerful workstations on which clinical staff view images captured by the scanners.
He poked about on the workstation and was surprised to find it crawled along, scarcely able to display images within a reasonable time.