I measure security as "is my shizz secure??" If yes, then it's secure. if no, then it's not secure. security is like death. you can't be mostly dead or somewhat dead.

Jezus, nothing is perfectly secure. It's a process.
That adage gets repeated all the time because it's absolutely true.

(BTW these days you'd be looking at a 6800 not a 6500 unless buying used, and the Nexus only if you've got some majorly complex things going on in the server room. Also we gave up on paying the cisco premium on the edge a while back, and have never looked back. While Cisco has been fiddling with SLA, other folks have made much cheaper alternate edge switches with fully adequate feature sets.)

You are mixing network gear vendors (HP Procurves, Netgear ?).

The one most important factor is reacting to change. Flexibility is crucial. For example, even though individual machines with drive arrays work well, moving to a SAN in the data center [2] is a necessary move for most applications. Similar with moving from racks of physical hardware to a VM infrastructure [3]. Network-wise, the future will be about dealing with edge devices (IoT stuff), and perhaps even having a separate WAN that is shared among companies that uses leased lines so that business transactions run on a separate network than the Internet.

Doesn't this require a decent sized company to begin with (+1000 users) or one with a specific need.
A SAN and virtual infrastructure isn't exactly cheap.

Of course, that notwithstanding, even a horse probably wouldn't want a statue of their ass made and sent on a world tour.

I guess you haven't met many horses then.
They are totally asspeople !
Twerking all the time, subscribing to the Kim Kardashian mailinglists, reading popular proctologist media, etc ...

Or do you consider everyone with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as insane?

Yes, they have a mental disorder and thus are classified insane.
Just because you take offence of the word doesn't mean it has changed or should change its meaning.

Dude seriously WTF? I'm serious...WTF are you doing man? those "utilities" are about as useful as tits on a boar hog, worse because at least the tits ain't slowing down the boar!

Yeah they do suck, but some of them control things like the Wireless hotkey which the clients do expect to work.
And yes Ninite is fantastic, I've been using it for 3 years now myself. Will check out driver-booster. Thanks !

BS as I've used WinXP drivers in Windows 7 and Windows 8 drivers in 7 as well, that's the nice thing about Windows they don't crap on drivers all the time. In fact the only caveat is that if you are using 32bit XP drivers you have to use Win 7 32bit but Linux AFAIK won't let you mix 32bit and 64bit drivers either so no difference there.

I thought the new improved driver model of Windows Vista and up made Windows XP drivers necessarily incompatible ?
Maybe it works now but I tried that back when Windows 7 was new and that never worked.

I had to downgrade a new Toshiba laptop last week and some toshiba utilities/drivers wouldn't run on Windows 7 or didn't exist at all.
And I'm not gonna put a Preview release on a client's worklaptop even though it usually is pretty stable, that's just silly.