It's a US centric poll, mind you, I thought those guys were at least aware of the next city if not anything beyond their shores.

That's called "I was born right here..."

The reasons can be very simple. For about 5 or 6 years, basically before I had kids, I regularly did 60-70 hour weeks. It was a combination of enjoying what I did and that there was work to be done. I didn't get paid overtime, the efforts was never openly acknowledged, but by the end of 4 years my salary in the same job had quadrupled from a reasonable starting point. Now I can do my 35-40 hour weeks as the manager, with those tough years paying dividends indefinitely. Admittedly, I can't help myself from working on the couch most evenings, but again, I enjoy it and it's my chance to stay involved in the technical aspects I don't have time for during the day.

IIRC, some Amiga games completely took over the computer

The good old "hitting the hardware directly" was a common turn of phrase at the time. Pinball Fantasies AGA did launch from Workbench and I think that was the main reason it got so much play in my uni flat as my flatmates didn't have to risk my wrath by rebooting my machine, if I was out , to play it.

They may also need or want the general benefits of a simple and stable general purpose OS. That's the category I fit into - and increasingly my family. Windows where I've no choice through a VM, Mac OS for everything else.

3 days? That's not good service. Good service on a laptop is next day on-site repair.

...which isn't even that 'good'...you'd expect it with any non bottom of the line Dell too.

And 10 years later, technically still fine so long as you've stockpiled spares. It's still (admittedly only for a few more months) on the critical path of a line of business / point of sale app my places depends on. It's only the lack of TR support under VMWare that finally forced me to start removing it.

I was going with "Give 'er Joey" but that may not be a global term...

That's how I saw it. I 'remediated' in 1997 but by 1999 our parent company sent in a 3rd party (Unisys) with 4 full time 'consultants' and endless ability to use other ad-hoc staff. The result of their 9 months of these backpackers...sorry, consultants surfing porn and checking the premier leage tables was.....no remediation required but a 7 figure bill. However, I did get to replace all my 486 PCs and put in new Proliants on what was then the new NetWare 5. I know these servers are are still running that business unit to this day so in the long run at least the unnecessary upgrades paid off. I was just insulted at the time that my work and findings 18 months prior weren't accepted as good enough.

What I see going on here, as others have touched on, is someone who doesn't realise that he's dealing with a small environment, even by my (Australian) standards where I'm frequently in awe of the kinds of scale that the US and Europe consider commonplace.

If the current system has been acceptable for 7 years, I'm guessing the users needs aren't something so mindbogglingly critical that risk must be removed at any cost. Equally, if that was the case, the business would be either bringing in an experienced team or writing a blank cheque to an external party, not giving it to the guy who changes passwords and has spent the last week putting together a jigsaw of every enterprise option out there, and getting an "n+1" tattoo inside his eyelids.

Finally, 7 years isn't exactly old. We've got a subsidiary company of just that size (150 users, 10 branches) running on Proliant 1600/2500/5500 gear (ie 90's) which we consider capable for the job, which includes Oracle 8, Citrix MF plus a dozen or so more apps and users on current hardware. We have the occasional hardware fault which a maintenance provider can address same day, bill us at ad-hoc rates yet we still see only a couple of thousand dollars a year in maintenance leaving us content that this old junk is still appropriate no matter which we we look at it.

This isn't suggesting the ISP's make any decisions, just to apply a new set of rules and have a procedure for disconnection. I suffered for weeks some years back from what looked like DoS attacks and masses of Spam which was largely coming from a single Internet Cafe on George St Sydney. I first spoke to the owner, who basically told me to get stuffed with what I assume were Chinese profanities chucked in for good measure. I appealed to him a few more times to at least try and clean up his machines, he told me to get stuffed. I think the closest he came to acknowledging he had a responsibility was "How am I meant to know what people put on the machines?" I got him cut off, problem went away, but this was only because he was using a major telco who I had some business with. Ordinarily I doubt I'd been able to have done anything and I'd have had to suffer and pay for all the wasted bandwidth / load on my relatively small connection. Many people must have been in just that situation so I'm glad there is even a suggestion that the offenders will now have their plug pulled.

I seriously can't believe that it took this far down the comments to see what I thought any sane person in the world already did. The service tag is the answer. The fact that it's printed and your reimaging can pull from BIOS being the main benefits. In my experience they are unique even if you use multiple manufacturers - certainly Dell, HP/COmpaq and IBM are all different styles and in 15 years I've got no overlaps. There are some fairly funny replies elsewhere, pity so many are unintentional...

Films at the cinema *are* jittery as hell but it's accepted and part of the feel. I'm always conscious of it but don't consider it to be unacceptable. Directors go to alot of effort to try and work around this. Watching a film is one thing but something you are actively controlling is painful when it's not as smooth as it should be.

RAID isn't a backup / data protection measure so it's irrelevant. It contributes too high availably, nothing more.

). If a machine three years more modern and costing twice as much wasn't better then the designers would have some explaining to do.

Absolutely, no argument there, the BBC crammed a lot in, especially given it was in many ways a rush job too. My post was purely on the subject of the BBC having the 8 digital IOs and 2 Analogue which schools seemed to think was a unique features... apparently right into the 90's. IN 1981 I was given a Vic-20 and thereafter was extremely jealous of those that got BBC's...to the point that I even used to POKE the VICs screen and border black, text white, type an underscore and cursor back over it to make it blink ;) in fact, I think I went as far as ruining the fantasy by typing "CHAIN "KILLER" (or whatever it was) and getting a syntax error ;)

Now, I'm not sure if it's a direct equivalent, but the Zorro slot on the Amigas did allow for the addition of both regular CPUs and/or an FPU. On my A500 I had a card with an 8086 in the trapdoor to enable 'native' DOS compatibility. Anyway...as you say, different vintage.