The Ubuntu Experiment

[Dave Woyciesjes]

Lorenzo Taylor wrote:
 > Dave Woyciesjes wrote:
>>         Add me (and over 2000 people here at my workplace) to the list
>> of folks 
>> who haven't seen a Win crash in a while.
>>         WinXP locking up/crashing here is not an issue. At all. It
>> happens, 
>> buut very infrequently

> This is most likely due to the people who work behind the scenes to keep
> it running. All computers in such an environment are backed up regularly
> and reformatted with a clean installation of Windows probably every
> month... Most workplaces have this policy in effect. The
> only variation is the time between reinstallations...  yes I have
> heard of reinstallation once a week, especially in a university
> environment, before reinstalling and restoring the systems. And this was
> in fact Windows XP Professional. They are able to restore things to the
> point where the end user doesn't realize that it has been done. At the
> university where I was told they reinstalled once a week, the only
> reason I knew this had happened was because I had a program that needed
> an authorization key that couldn't be restored from their backup and
> there was a limited number of authorization keys available. I walked in
> one day and couldn't figure out why my program didn't work properly.
> This is when they told me that they reformat once a week...

	None of that happens here at this large University. The users just beat 
on their machines, day after day, no preventive maintenance on the part 
of IT. And they keep going. And sometimes something stops. They call the 
HelpDesk, we do a couple things, and about 90% of all calls to us get 
fixed on first contact.
	Automatic reformats, at any schedule, would absolutely _not_ fly here 
at all. There would be heads served up on plates for that. As another 
data point, I have not heard of any place that has a regularly scheduled 
reformat/reinstall scheme in place. IMHO, it sounds like a band-aid plan 
to cover up a bigger issue no one has bothered to try & solve.
	As for your University reinstalling once a week? I find that hard to 
believe. I'm going to have to through down a BS card on that. If you can 
prove this to me by pointing me to the ITS policy stating this, please do.

	At this point, seems like we have veered just a tad off-topic... Should 
kill this thread, or move it somewhere else....

-- 
--- Dave Woyciesjes
--- ICQ# 905818
--- AIM - woyciesjes

"From there to here,
 From here to there,
Funny things
are everywhere."
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