On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 5:57 PM, Darren Marshall via Mercedes <mercedes@okiebenz.com> wrote: > Craig, let me know if you want to buy an iMac...
Seems a little drastic. Let me get out of the way that I am not a Windows guy. At work I have probably 30-50 Linux VMs outside IT that I've spun for various people, and I spend less time managing those than the 5-10 long-running Windows servers I've done. I first installed Redhat 6 when that was latest (not RHEL 6 :) and have had at least one Linux machine ever since. That said, the kids are using Windows at school, and so I have had W7 on all my user machines at home for several years. I've installed W7 probably 10 times at home (various laptops/desktops/etc.), mostly on older machines. It's always performed better than XP on those systems, and for the most part better than X Windows - at least from a startup/responsiveness perspective. These are home machines so are powered up and down all the time. The kids log in, do stuff, and then I wipe the system and install again after a while (aforementioned 'registry is stupid' thought). So far it has been pretty painless, but: 1) I know where the drivers are for all the systems. I usually stick them on a USB the first time I have to get them, then update those I can find the next install. 2) I have figured out the trick for installing with the upgrade licenses I have. This is totally absurd but it's the game I play for buying the cheap licenses. 3) I always install on a fast-ish network, and plan to download all the updates over the first few days. I'll do one install the first night, start the second in the morning, the third the next night, and so on. It's silly when I've been able to apt-get update since forever, but it works. 4) I forget to log out / power down at least once a week, so the machine does its updates overnight on that day. 5) HP printer drivers are bad. The hacked ones on Linux are so much better. 6) I once had to call in to proclaim to the lady that I was not using the license elsewhere after a reinstall, but they've never hassled me beyond that for redeploying it. Really I think #3 is the key. Once everything is installed, the updater does a good job keeping up, but the upgrades don't install well out of order. I assume they never fixed the requirement to install updates in waves to account for this, but obviously it doesn't work. You can emulate this on a slower link by installing he latest SP and then running updater, but that in itself is a pain. (For Craig, if he was able to leave the system alone on the internet it would eventually take care of itself, but it would probably take a few days and obviously that's not reasonable on dialup.) So, even though I'm a Linux geek, and tend to deploy them 5x as often as Windows systems*, I think W7 is a decent OS, and a bit better than XP on the same hardware. You really don't have to be scared of it. *Okay, that's hardly fair, we also have a lot of physical servers outside IT: about 60% Unix, 20% each Linux/Windows, and one poor little Mac Mini with a load of different OSX VMs. But if we only count general-computing x86 VMs... Best, Tim wants to spend more time in the real Mercedes than the virtual PCs, but one pays the bills and the other creates them :) _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
