I had some lady knock on our door last fall looking for her son. Apparently someone put him on the wrong bus and he got off in our neighborhood (no where near where he lived). He was going to a private Catholic school about 5 miles from our house.

How is this insightful? Gigabit only requires Category 5 cabling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/802.3ab

For the average, locked-down business user, Vista is virtually the same as XP. The only real difference is the start menu, and if that posses such a problem - it can be reverted through Group Policy.

Besides, I thought you open source fanboys only cared about licensing costs and not TCO (at least according to Slashdot, no training is required to move to Open Office or Ubuntu.)

Your first step is to dig through all of the documentation you have to find any and all software purchases. This included going through the previous guy's email (hopefully it's still available) and digging out the license cards from those boxes stashed in the corner. If you are lucky, someone in accounting can start pulling invoices from you. Also, go to the resellers your company has been using to see if they can pull a purchase history or license report (CDW is great for this). Don't forget to try sites like Microsoft's eOpen (eopen.microsoft.com) or Adobe's license site (licensing.adobe.com).

The next step is to audit your workstations and servers to see exactly what commercial software they are running. Try to match that up with what documentation you found to start with. My rule of thumb is that if I don't have a PO/invoice, license key or box, then I don't own the software. Then go and get quotes from your favorite reseller to see what the costs are to "true-up".

Take all of this to your manager (or the owner) and show them the situation. Be sure to explain the consequences of not licensing the software you are using, and leave the decision up to him whether to true-up, stop using the software, or use it unlicensed. I would personally document this meeting just to cover your own ass, especially if the last option is chosen.

In order to prevent this situation in the future, make sure all software purchases come through your department. Then keep all license documentation in a single physical or electronic location. Be prepared to dig your heels in when someone tries to bypass IT to install illegal/unlicense software.

Good catch. On top of that, as long as a company meets a few small requirements for developing on a Windows platform, they can become a Microsoft partner. It is not some secret club that goes around suing OSS companies on behalf of Microsoft.

We when through the same process as the parent post (replacing Trendmicro Officescan as it has gone to crap). I ended up deciding on NOD32 over Kaspersky, but they were two we liked best. NOD32 has had a few minor problems, and the initial configuration can be time consuming, but overall it is a huge improvement over Trend at a considerably better price.

With Trend, it frequently missed malware and viruses but NOD32 has been great (our infection rate is probably 10% of what it used to be).

Interesting, so failing memory doesn't effect the system cache. That is some magical hardware you have there.

If you think Australian Personal Computer Magazine is a US site, then there isn't much we can do to help you.

That's a really good point. How do I know that the latest update to Forecastfox isn't now ready my browsing history or passwords and uploading that information to a third party. Many addons do not need access to the web page being rendered, so I wonder why there isn't some additional layer of security there.