thats not that many once you think about. with all the snap-ins they have already that ship with os and the few products i use that have their own, i'm sitting at over 1,100. one of powershell's biggest advantages is the standardization of cmdlet names. plus you dont have to remember all the cmdlets, get-command is your friend

Domain admins having admin on windows client isn't that big of a deal. A domain admin wielding GPO or Configuration Manager can do more harm then with local box admin privs. Plus, those guys own the directory service, there's a lot of power that just with that.

Your better OEMs will allow you to subsitute a statement of destruction for a warrentee replacement. If the drive has had an opertunity to have come in contact with anything classified, its wiped, exposed to a bulk magnetic eraser, then a hammer till the platters are in parts. Dont think a magnet will kill and ssd, but my "Air Force Fine Adjustment Tool" will.

Group Policy can distribute your public copy of your root cert to you're windows box in your AD environmnent. Whole process should take way under an hour to do.

Amen. Thats one of the things i'm working on is getting my os imaging process to enable bitlocker without human intervention.

Of course, that old BIOS option where it would protect the MBR worked real well.

It was the SGC firing at yet another goa'uld mothership, duh!

Agreed. Take a few steps back from this, and assume not everyone is an enthusiast. think about a few things.

I'm a government agency with about 1500 desktops/laptops. our first big cost is labor. yes our technicians are salaried, but we need a certain level of productivity to meet internal SLA's

We go with a Tier 1 OEM for our desktops, and are pretty strict about what come in the door.your choices are based on what i can support with microsoft's Configuration Manager's Operating System Deployment (OSD). using OSD, our imaging time is 1 hour. Thats all the drivers, patches, applications, everything. and the technician spends about 5 minutes to launch the process and walk away. My OEM goes as far to deliver driver packs for my OSD process. new model of their business class desktop? no proble, in about an hour, i can add support of that model in to our OSD imaging process.

How about that licensing you mentioned? are you seriously considering retail media (if your activation isnt stored in the motherboard, its not OEM)? how do you plan to manage your license keys? OEM means its in the bios and you dont have to worry too much. no keys to keep track of, or enter. You could go with an enterprise agreement, roll the enterprise edition of your OS, and either use a single MAK key or run KMS. its one thing to deal with a stick on the side of the box when you first image it, but how about 9 months down the road when you hdd craps out, and you need to reinstall your OS.

anything you bring in the door has a minimum life cycle of 3 years. our contract with OEM states everything will have a warranty for at least that, with options for 4 and 5 years as well. With that in mind, i know my end users will be down for a day while parts are being delivered, i wont get a different revision of a part that might break something else. and i dont have to worry about parts availability in general.

also, are you looking at a business class system? and is some of your hardware specs realistic? Six core I7 system for general office work isnt realistic. your HR people aren't going to care that their system gets a really high benchmark score. Can they process their paperwork in a quick manner, if so then they're happy. Try looking a Core2 system with 4 gigs. we pay about 600~700 for one with with a three year warranty.

at the end of the day, that desktop is a fixed, one time cost. however, your salary is an ongoing expense. you should look at maximizing that value. look at how well you can deliver a quality service with minimal time. If you have a good relationship with your OEM, your job gets even easier.

I may be sitting on a descent home build here at home, but at work, its a Optiplex 755 with a core2-quad and 8 gigs.

simple, everyone else is busy having said good time. They're also probably pissed off they're not having a good time as well.

If you read further into EFO, you'd see that bootloaders are not a requirment any more

Exactly. boxes from Dell's Optiplex line and HP DC series are designed to be long like machines. common parts between models, long availability of orderable parts make supporting the things 3 years from just as easy.Desktop support is supoposed to be quick and boring.

You'll also want to look at deployment tools. I know Dell gives away tools to intergrate into Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and System Center Configuration Manager. And both HP and Dell will sell you an alteris based solution to roll these boxes out. If you put the proper infrastructure in, you will cut down your long term costs in rolling the boxes out, We invested in Coinfiguration Manger, and with Dell's driver packs, it takes me about 15 minutes to add support for a new model and my master image wont break. It also take about 5 minutes of a tech's time to kick off a system reimage (boot from network, enter your credentials, pick your OS, click next, walk away) and an hour and a half later, out pops a done box, completely patched.

This is nothing new. MS has a tool called System Center Custom Update Pubpluser (or SCUP). Dell, Citrix, and Adobe Flash all have had catalogs to publish into WSUS/SCCM since 2007. Shavik put out a custom catalog last week.

They have. DDS is junk. I rana little bit of DLT, and a lot of LTO. LTO has been very good to me.

Agreed,I cut my teeth on DAT DDS3 drives. The carts wer junk, just flimsy plastic. The drives had to be constantly cleaned, and i was lucky if all my drives made it througha week with no problems. I've been doing LTO now for 8 or so years, and they have been solid

A sure fire way to make sure you get your tapes off site is a regularly schedualed pickup from your off-site company.

Agreed. We have to archive stuff for 10+ years due to various legal reasons. I found have good backup software and a library with a barcode reader really helps. The backup software reads the barcode from the tape via the library and sets the media name the same. That saves alot of administrative overhead. Plus if your backup software is any good, it will keep a database of what data is on what tape.

The one thing you have to be mindfull about with LTO tapes is they have obselecence built in. The drives will read and write is generation (n) and one before (n-1), and read N-2. anyhing past N-2 your SOL

As for off-site tape vendors, shop around and visit the facility.I've seen some on paper that sound great, but inspected they arent that great. If you're Near the Philly, New Jersey, New Your area, Vital Records is a great company (not a paid shill, just a very happy customer)