• IT Professional • IT Professional • IT Professional • IT Professional • IT Professional
• IT Professional • IT Professional • IT Professional • IT Professional • IT Professional
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With solutions for
• System administration
• Security compliance
• Networking
• Data management
Why choose me?
I am a no-nonsense computer technician focused on efficiency, simplicity, and sharing my knowledge.
About me:
I am currently working as the PC Tech Department Team Lead (manager) at an IT company in Atlanta. My team performs work on desktop PCs, laptops, micro PCs, all-in-ones, and servers. We diagnose and repair used machines and prepare them for resale, repurposing, or recycling based on their value and condition. We work with all brands of computers and servers, including obscure, vintage, and even medical models. Our team ensures that customer data from previously used devices is securely handled throughout the repurposing process.
I offer services including hardware and software support for troubleshooting and configuration, both in-person and remote. I also provide solutions for fast and reliable file sharing across Windows, Mac, and network storage devices, as well as data loss prevention/recovery services. I can help clients meet industry-specific security compliance requirements through policy implementation, enforcement, and auditing. Additionally, I can deploy, maintain, and monitor workstations, servers, networking appliances, and other business infrastructure products.
I hold an active CompTIA A+ certification. I originally graduated with a Bachelor of Science from the University of North Florida. I have also completed several continuing education courses through Emory University.
What others say about me:
“Andy is able to work within our budget. That is one thing that Andy is good at: being able to take whatever your budget is, whether it is small or large, and work within your means.”
“He does things very quickly and efficiently.”
“When Andy says he is going to follow through and meet deadlines, he does that, and he communicates. He keeps us in the loop on how things are proceeding.”
— Jimmy Orth
“Andy is an extremely talented and hard-working..."
"Throughout my time working with him for over 4 years, he was also an amazing leader and mentor."
"He always knew how to solve any problem, whether it was something technical or creative."
"He has a great work ethic and is very proactive and persistent when taking on projects.”
— Travis Misarti
“Professional in every aspect.”
— Scott Reneau
“[Andy has] an attitude to be collaborative and to meet the needs of the client.”
— Dr. Nicholas Serenati
My cyber-life from now to the beginning :
The 2020s - Computing on a different level
When I finally began working exclusively as a full-time IT professional, it felt great to know my many years of technical problem-solving working in the video post-production field had paid off. My first IT role was PC Tech, and I immediately began testing and repairing thousands of desktops, laptops, servers, surveillance systems, tablets, and more. My position entailed identifying defects and failing components in machines, researching the machine’s value, and repairing them if possible and if it was worth it. I gained extensive hardware experience with Apple, Acer, Asus, Dell, HP HPE, Lenovo, Microsoft Surface, and MSI products, as well as motherboards from AsRock, Asus, Gigabyte, and SuperMicro. I also got to work with medical machines from Philips, Siemens, and G.E.
I was promoted to my current role as the PC Tech Department’s Team Lead. My current position involves training and guiding new team members, monitoring their progress, and offering ongoing support. Employee supervision for quality assurance, focused on the team’s testing accuracy, consistency, compliance, and accountability. This has also resulted in far lower error rates. I’ve had great success mentoring new staff, resulting in massive productivity improvements, sometimes increasing by over 100% higher output.
The majority of my professional work takes place in Windows. I personally own and prefer a Mac as my daily driver. I have been using an M1 MacBook Air for years. This is the first daily driver laptop I’ve used with an ARM processor. I find that ARM software compatibility these days is great, and I love the long battery life. I have installed Asahi Linux (a fork of Fedora) onto the laptop. Dual-booting on an M1 chip machine has been a cool experiment. Importantly, I have learned that Linux software compatibility for ARM is still a major limiting factor. Anyways, this M1 laptop was just powerful enough for me when I was regularly video editing before my switch to I.T., and to this day it still performs great. It might be my favorite machine to date.
Late 2010s - Bigger is better
In 2019, I was asked to audit the IT security of the company I worked for to meet Disney's production vendor requirements. Completing the process required extensive paperwork and speaking with consultants. Through this process, I understood what it takes to be truly cyber-secure. Investment, intentional policy making, relentless monitoring and enforcement, and a deep understanding of the technology deployed in a production environment are all critical to daily security.
I worked on several custom PC builds during this era of my career, such as one with an i9-9900K and an AMD Vega 64 card. This was the last Hackintosh-compatible machine I built right before Apple shifted to the M1 processor. During these years, I would gain a lot more exposure to Linux. I began to tinker with CentOS, Kali Linux, and Parrot OS. I also spent lots of time working in TrueNAS Core (based on FreeBSD) and QTS, the operating system for QNAP NAS devices.
I oversaw over 15 iMacs and other PCs, NASes, and servers. The experience of managing staff and administering their workstations was eye-opening. I learned that data management situations get out of hand quickly when policies are unclear or not enforced. All files should have an exact, known place where it should be saved. Due to the large amount of data the company needed to manage during this time, we began archiving footage onto LTO-7 and LTO-8 tapes to help reduce overall cost. In total, I have helped oversee roughly 1PB of video footage across the years I was working in the video industry.
Early 2010s - My TonyMacX86 era
I built a custom PC for the first time with the help of my brother-in-law. He showed me all the parts I needed and how to buy used parts without getting ripped off. This solidified my love for computer tinkering and problem-solving. I built this system as a Hackintosh PC. The CPU was an i7-3770K and used a Gigabyte motherboard. The best part was that I deshelled multiple of my matching external HDDs and created an eight-drive RAID 10 configuration with a RocketRAID card. I experienced two different 2 bad motherboards during the course of using this machine. This was quite the learning experience and tested my backup habits. I started with a GeForce GTX 660TI. Later, my brother-in-law gave me a GTX 980 as a gift, and the additional CUDA cores and VRAM made my editing software faster and much more stable. I also began Linux distro hopping for the first time with this machine, starting with Linux Mint and Ubuntu.
The late 2000s - Thinking different
Then, in 2005 or ‘06, my parents bought me a Pentium D HP Pavilion. This was way more powerful than the Pentium 4 and was fully capable of editing full standard-definition video resolutions. This marked the jump from using IDE drives to SATA. This would be my first foray into upgrading PCs, ultimately needing dual graphics cards and 4TB of storage, a good amount of hardware for a young consumer to have at the time.
2007 was the beginning of my journey with Apple which dominated the world of video during the late 2000s back when Final Cut Pro had a huge user base. The first Apple machine I could call my own was a MacBook Pro 17” with a Core 2 Duo. I kept this laptop for 6 years and experienced dangerously inflated lithium batteries three different times. This was my main machine for both studying and doing freelance work while earning an undergrad. With this laptop, I began to produce professional level media for the first time. I would begin to learn Photoshop. And this is also where I learned more about computers such as creating a dual-booting-system for the first time, OSX and Windows Vista. I would also clone boot drives onto externals and boot them up over FireWire. I needed a substantial amount of storage (at the time) for my projects, 16TB total. Through purchasing these hard drives, I would begin to learn about RAID configurations.
The early 2000s - “Dude, you are getting a Dell”
A year or two later, I would get my hands on more powerful computers, starting with a Pentium 4 Dell Dimension 3000. Around this time, my parents would get our house a broadband internet connection. I began to code websites at this time, using Microsoft FrontPage and later Adobe Dreamweaver. Exposure to small office servers: a Dell PowerEdge 1900 - Windows Server
The 1990s - My first beige box
Looking back, I realize that I’ve been around computers my whole life, including when I was very young. The first killer app for me was Paint on Windows 3.1. I learned to type in grade school, and I first explored the internet on a dial-up connection at my local library. Exploring computers, discovering new applications, and learning how to use them was very fun. A perfect example of this was discovering Windows Movie Maker. I first discovered this application preinstalled on Windows XP on my Pentium III Gateway GP7-500 PC. The potential of this program blew me away. It is hilarious now to think back on the limited power I was using. The first video I created had a tiny resolution and was 11 minutes long, but unbelievably, it took 13 hours to render on a Pentium III. I only had a 20GB hard drive at the time, so I had the free space to store only that one rendered video before my drive was full.
What I enjoy outside computing
I love distance running, road biking, and CrossFit. Also, I like to travel the world with my wife. The furthest away I’ve been to date is India, where I attended an Indian wedding with my relatives in New Delhi. Other notable places include Germany and Austria, where my cousins got married. I’ve also visited France, Italy, Canada, and many cities in the U.S.
Before working in the IT field, I spent over ten years working in video post-production. I switched paths because I saw a need for talented and knowledgeable computer problem-solvers. While working in video, I would regularly troubleshoot machines and engineer strategies for dealing with massive footage libraries hundreds of terabytes in size. Advanced IT skills were the critical factor for reliable and efficient operations, and this realization led me to my new career path.
If you would like to see some of my old video work, click here to jump to a page dedicated to that.
