T1B

Dear god...

My "other-other-other job" occasionally involves doing rollouts/deployments/whatnot for big companies.

Just got a taste of MS's new debaucle.

With XP, a two man crew can image 250 machines or so in a (short) day, depending on a number of factors. Yesterday -- two of us cranked out a whopping 25ish.

Neither myself or my partner did the sysprep, thank goodness, but the guy who did is a master, and does that stuff all day for several years. Not a pretty picture with 7.0.

These machines had the extra steps of being named and attached to their future domain, and just that is several extra minutes per box -- which takes all of a few minutes to do a dozen or two in the XP/2003 environment.


But my favorite part -- 7 doesn't enable the admin account by default. Nope, the image sets up a dummy user, which gets deleted, then an admin account has to be added manually through the command line (I though MS was trying to get away from the command stuff).

Just ridiculously cumbersome. About 5 (slowwwww) reboots just to image a machine. Goodness knows what the main contractor is charging the fools who fell for MS's latest schtick (it-to-you).

Microsoft is just a disaster any way you slice it. They will only more strenuously grasp at straws now, as things move more and more out of their hands.

Dins' world lately:

net user administrator /active:yes

net user administrator /active:yes

net user administrator /active:yes

net user administrator /active:yes


Most home users can fudge their way through an XP install. While I haven't done a basic install from a CD, I'm guessing that MS's support lines start ringing off the hook when a non-professional tries to make heads or tails of this stuff.

While things are only getting bigger, which is inevitable, one of the Windows 7 images we installed was 7 freaking gigs. 7.

Although my initial thought is that it's a hell of a lot more usuable than Vista (although the ultra-techies tell me it's just Vista with a service pack, but Vista was such a disaster, they went with a name change rather than a new incarnation of Vista).

At least you can turn the auto-updates off in 7 -- which for some ungodly reason you can't do with Vista. What network admin in their right mind is going to buy a product that isn't confugurable in terms of what accesses the internet and when?

Seems to me it's the very large corporations that are the main component of MS's bread-and-butter, so it's insane that they keep doing stuff to piss the admins off with shit like auto-enabling-auto-updates, and other such stupidity, like "are you SURE you want to _____?"

The organization I work for is still - and for the foreseeable future - on XP...even though they pay MS the $$ to be "upgraded" at any time.

In 5 years we'll all be on Google's OS, methinks...

PSUFAN wrote:The organization I work for is still - and for the foreseeable future - on XP...even though they pay MS the $$ to be "upgraded" at any time.

In 5 years we'll all be on Google's OS, methinks...

My company had a shit load of cash lined up for some IT overhauls including an OS upgrade but then times got tough, the stock took a tumble and the OT project was cut by 2/3. I suspect a lot of companies are stuck paying MS for the upgrade by don't have the internal resources to complete it because of cutbacks.

We have been evaluating Google Apps for our organization...and the Microsoft competitor is next in line. We have some stodgy elements who are extremely reluctant to move away from MS. I think they fear their jobs will be eliminated...and honestly, that would not exactly be a bad thing.

Google offers more space and more functionality - for a lot less money. Honestly, I can't see that MS can really compete. They seem to be relying on the "comfort" factor - that people will be reluctant to change.

It will boil down to money, and Google will win.

I'd be more then happy to go with some google Action. I'm looking to upgrade to their phone in the near future. I've been using the Microsoft based phones and while they are very useful for being able to do basically whatever you want (calls, data modem, wifi, apps, etc...) MS just does not lend itself to being a phone perfectly. Sorry. Worse of all, it still freezes and I hate the touch screens on these things. As soon as I can scrape a few hundred together, I'm going for one of the Verizon google phones, plus in a month or so there will be some decent reviews out so I'll have better ideas on which phone to get.