On behalf of all the sysadmins out there that have to connect to their end-users' workstations remotely, across widely variable WAN links, and perform maintenance or troubleshooting....I would like to state my preference for the standard, plain vanilla, no animated effects Windows 2000-style desktop.

When your seniour exec is on the phone yammering about their issue and you have to remote in and SEE what the heck they are talking about, it makes our job DRAMATICALLY simpler if all those pretty little gewgaws are turned off. Additionally, it tends to make the end-users' experience better based on the simple performance boost of less drag on the display.

Looking pretty is fine and has its place, I'll agree, but on a business workstation: rounded windows, pretty jellybean buttons, varying opacities, and animated effect only serve as a distraction to productivity.

I have used MRTG, CACTI, and PRTG in production use for a little more than 500 unique devices. I started piloting OpenNMS but never got too deep into it before I moved on so I cannot comment on its usefulness. I CAN, however, say that PRTG (especially in the new v7) is the whole shebang for us.

There used to be a PRTG product and an IPCheck product from Paessler but -now- the PRTG product has pretty-much everything in one convenient package. You can monitor routers and switches (that Cacti was so very, very good at doing) but it also can monitor servers, printers, and other hardware. Anything you can expose an OID for, you can check it with PRTG. We have the NetFlow version, as well, so I capture all the NetFlow streams from our boundary routers and core routing switches. All of the critical Windows/Linux boxes in-house are also a breeze to setup and monitor.

For the price, the product is really a great deal. The commercial support is good, too, not to mention the large volume of customer/vendor forums on their website. I highly recommend it, esp. considering the short deployment time it required.

Regardless of whether this was meant seriously or not...

In 10 or 15 years, the need to physically PLUG your computing device into something will, likely, be obsolete. Wireless will be matured to the point wherein our ever-more-mobile society will be completely unplugged. Maybe large carriers will still continue with physical media connections between devices but end-users will be free from such restraint.

I have executive end-users who do a considerable amount of work from their homes via VPN. My boss has a hardware VPN link running 24/7 with servers hanging off it. This generates quite a bit of transfer that will easily break the cap.

Things like this are the death knell of work-from-home. The providers assume that all their customers' Internet usage is "casual" and "discretionary". In fact, some of their customers are working to keep their jobs as more and more corporations downsize and reduce costs by letting people telecommute.

"Sorry Mr. Bossman. I can't work today because my ISP capped my transfers."

(*expletive deleted*)

I'll agree that these newer OS's from Microsoft have gotten prettier but they have they increased productivity?

For me, from a management perspective, all of this wonderful "upgrade" in eye candy for the end-user has only increased the amount of time it takes for me to troubleshoot a problem. Here I am attempting to remotely control someone's workstation half a world away and it looks like a slideshow because of all the wonderful gewgaws prettying up the screen.

Seriously, our end-users are here to perform a job. This job has a fairly limited scope of tasks within. No amount of beautification of the UI is going to help them accomplish these tasks. In my opinion, they only serve to confound, confuse, and constrict our ability to just "get the job done". Oh, I am well aware of how to turn off most of these "enhancements" but the underlying code that runs the desktop experience is still much slower to redraw my screen all the way back here to my desk.

I would have much preferred Microsoft add honest-to-goodness functionality to their new OS's rather than concentrating so much on their window dressing.

Good grief!!

I had hundreds of BE6's (and their impressive array of variants) in workstations and servers. The great majority of them died with nasty leaky and explosive capacitors. Abit cheaped out by getting their cut-rate caps from a questionable supplier and *I* was the one who had to pay the price...never bought another Abit mobo again.

I shan't miss them.

'Nuff said.