Michelle Knight's Profile

As well as her programming skills, Michelle is also skilled in PC/server hardware and networking. Although no pictures of her clients sites can be shown, these pictures are of Michelle's own hardware.

She was trained in the late 80's in board level specification, build and maintenance of PC type hardware and this was built on as her career progressed and evolved in to servers and networks. She even wired her own house for RJ45.

Tasks undertaken include networking across countries, DSL, cable, ISDN and analogue modems, routers, switches, moving server rooms, sorting out patch pannels and day to day repair of PC's, servers and printers. Michelle can even repair laptops. She also has experience of DLT, DAT drives and similar, including SCSI interfaces, hardware RAID systems and other specialist equipment.

Also included is Michelle's ability to specify hardware and evaluate equipment for the business requirements, taking in to account the organisaitons future needs.

Another of her traits is the ability to build various operating systems and design the core of the server and client functionality in both Microsoft and Novell environments. She makes the best use of ghosting techniques and data file placement to minimise the time spent in rebuilding clients and make it as easy as possible to recover data from them.

Michelle knows the value of keeping track of hardware and has played a part in a number of asset management and equipment roll out projects for various customers, including the decomissioning of unused hardware.

Michelle also has experience of peripheral hardware including imaging systems, OCR, combined video/audio streams and also still imaging, aided by her own love of photography!

She also uses audio capture and digital editing techniques to reclaim old audio recordings and has a minor project in digitising her collection of vinyl recordings.

Her use of publishing has also seen her maintain A1 plotters and printers for companies as well as using her own equipment for generating everything from pamphlets to thirty page A5 newsletters.

When it comes to hardware, Michelle defiantely has a tallent for matching hardware to requirements and making sure that the most use possible is made of a companies purchases. She has also engaged in data recovery from operating systems on clients and servers which have crashed beyond simple operational means, even using PCMCIA cards to recover data from laptop hard disks.

Her grounding in programming also enables her to think laterally about the application and configuration of hardware in order to get the best performance possible and to get around the inevitable incompatabilities that are encountered.