Re: Hi
- From: "Robert Moir" <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 19:08:18 GMT
"T i m" <news@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:kbpbd3p9vl30nvoam2ebkt0at5m725btv5@xxxxxxxxxx
Of course, but in the real world with 100+ PC's a 4 Macs you might see
how it *could* work out?
Well "could" covers a lot of ground. If you're running an IT department who
are required to support Macs, palm pilots or whatever in addition to the
"normal" windows machine on every desktop and you don't plan to support
these additional resources properly then you're a fraud and deserve to be
found out, simple as that and I'm not really interested in excuses. Same
would apply to a largely Mac-based organisation that required a few Windows
boxes for some contrived reason or other.
It's been a long while since I've managed such a small network so I
apologise if I seem out of touch with what small business is doing these
days.
There's lots of stuff where I work that I could cheerfully throw into a big
skip, soak in petrol and set on fire tomorrow but I'm _required_ to deal
with it so I put the best face on it I can and get on with my life.
What happens when a team of MS-orientated support
staff have their network upgraded from NT4 server/workstation to Windows
2003 and XP or Vista?
They carry on using 'Windows' ?
Hardly. The name is about the only thing that would stay the same over that
sort of OS upgrade (and its not an uncommon scenario either, lots of places
still running NT4 out there). The users would require substantial
retraining.
Ok, if they swapped the 100 PC's for Macs and assuming they could get
the Mac compatible version of the software then I could see the
support staff being more interested (if they weren't I'm not sure how
easy it would be to get replacements that were) but then you would
have a large proportion of the staff to retrain?
So you're saying that upgrades from Windows 2000 to Windows Vista, for
example, or to a major new version of a line-of-business app that everyone
_has_ to be able to use do not incur training costs?
No. However I suggest there is a 'bigger' difference going even from
say XP to OSX than XP to Vista (and I don't like Vista because I don't
need it).
Well my specific example earlier was NT4 to Vista (or XP, where the
difference would be smaller). Actually, even if I accept that the users
won't see a big difference, XP to Vista would require substantial retraining
on behalf of the support staff. Nearly everything they think they know about
managing Windows workstations on a network has just changed.
Well the thing to remember, of course, is that most users are _not_
Windows
or Mac OSX users or Linux users, they're people trying to do their job
with
the tools provided.
You could be right but statistically if they have a machine at home
what sort do you think it's likely to be?
Obviously you want the point that they're probably running Windows but I'm
not sure why that matters. People will be running all kinds of operating
systems at home, probably whatever came with the machine, and they'll be
running all kinds of 'office apps' at home, probably whatever came with the
machine or whatever they downloaded for free because they heard about
something called Open Office.
I'm really unsure how owning a 6 year old machine with Windows ME and a 4
year old version of Star Office and some really nasty spyware that makes
using the web impossible helps Maureen in accounts learn how to use Windows
Vista with Office 2007 and a web-based asset-tracking system at work.
This hodge-podge of virus and spyware riddled (if you want statistics then
what are the studies for the percentage of those home computers infested
with some kind of nasty or other saying, again?) computers is going to be a
poor training ground for an organised, managed and hopefully gleaming tower
of the latest hardware, OS and application software.
I'm not saying it's impossible that people get a benefit at work from having
computers at home, clearly that does happen. But you can't count on it. It's
certainly not much help when rolling out software that's still quite new and
very different from what they had before (hello Office 2007) and don't have
at home yet.
But you (they) know what you are getting with even the Asda PC, that
the users will probably have seen the hardware / OS before and you
have engineers that can buy and replace all the spare parts anywhere
(cheaply) and fit them themselves. I assume you would also be able to
do that with yer cooperate Mac ... .. you wouldn't have yer support
staff standing in the queue at an Apple service centre?
I don't know what small businesses like that 100 PCs thing do but we very
rarely touch the inside of our workstations regardless of what operating
system they run, that's farmed out to the suppliers via warranties or some
very good specialised support companies where the warranty support doesn't
last long enough or isn't up to standard. We might pop the lids off a couple
of machines a month when trying to resolve odd hardware issues or audit what
components are in a PC but that's about it, everyone in the team really has
got better things to do than run around fiddling with CPU fans and hard
disks at work.
.
- References:
- Prev by Date: Re: Hi
- Next by Date: Re: Hi
- Previous by thread: Re: Hi
- Next by thread: Re: Hi
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
