DDR1 RAM is expensive. Many machines still use it.

The answer isn't always 'just buy a cheap ', especially when someone is short of cash but has an old PC in the loft.

I'm not in the US. Also, sarcasm.

Not only am I going to look after their IT, I'm going to be jointly responsible for writing and enforcing their compliance policy.

Personal data is currently secured by dint of everyone using Remote Desktop to get into the Win 2008 server, where the full-on policy, claims, accounting and document management software resides. They're still going through a transition to this new software, away from a Citrix Metaframe accessible remote provider (which was utterly debilitating, having only been provisioned with 1Mb of access bandwidth and some clearly overtasked servers on the other end).

Unfortunately, the incumbent 3rd-party IT support company fail to recognise any of the already problematic malware attack vectors. The main one being that people are using the RDP shortcut from personal laptops with no control whatsoever. I took on the role a little over 1 full week ago and already there have been 2 instances of laptop users bringing in malware resulting from their home internet activity. My real job is explaining to the directors the why's and how's of this being a really bad idea.

Oh, and the Win 2008 server hasn't even got BitLocker switched on.

I do hope I don't get to work tomorrow to find MSE has updated itself to V2.

I'm in the process of taking over responsibility of our entire IT and it's a nightmare of mis-matched, outdated hardware and utterly pathetic security policies (lack thereof). There are Win 2000 machines on the network with no AV installed and there are XP machines with MSE installed, a terminal services server (Win 2008, the 'Vista' version) with AVG on it.

Oh, and the company I work for is an insurance broker. Security somewhat essential.

MSE nags a little. It whines if you don't run a full scan every now and then. It also brings PC's to a crawl during any sort of scan. This I know because my PC at work goes into slow-ass mode at 11am every day.

AVG has also seen its fair share of false-positive-fuck-your-system-up debacles. So has Norton/Symantec and McAfee.

NOD32 and Kaspersky might have, but I don't remember.

Did you not do a little research before you jumped on the Symantec train? Everyone's heard of Norton, but that isn't necessarily a good thing.

If you want a high-class solution, it's Kaspersky, NOD32 or F-Secure.

Currently, I like NOD. Previously, I liked MSE. Next month, I'll probably like Kaspersky.

For mercy, sir!

You want to muck about with user training to get them to use OpenOffice? I know it's mostly compatible and lookey-likey with MS Office, but 'mostly' doesn't cut it with office workers. Office workers despise change, hate the unknown and will go into mutiny if you take the usual and replace it with something different just to save a little (OK, a lot of) money.

Dell server, DROBO filestore and a bunch of really cheap desktops will cover many usage needs.

Windows 2003 was never a workstation OS. Windows 2000 was. The upgrade path from 2000 for professionals was to XP SP1, and that is exactly what happened.

This the same one where the projected time can drift from the time displayed on the front of the clock?

Yeah, real confusing :)

What are you doing every time you visit a web page? WWW = double u double u double u = 2*(2+1) 2*(2+1) 2*(2 + 1)

What?

It's also potentially a low-bandwidth way of broadcasting encoded messages.

What makes you think this wouldn't be expensive? SSD's are inherently expensive.

Anyway, I have little sympathy with users who don't have a clue how to work a computer properly. Either they should clue up, or be happy to pay through the nose when stuff goes wrong which they don't know how to fix. That's the harsh reality of life.

I couldn't fix my car myself, so I'd have to pay out to get it sorted by a professional (or even a non-pro who knew enough to get the job done).

Sure, OEM's are taking liberties by charging stupidly high amounts for retrospective supply of recovery disks, but they're only charging what people are willing to pay.

I bet you were popular!

They're exceptionally rugged machines. You can pull An Amiga 1200 apart whilst it's running and it won't crash unless you do something daft like unplug the accelerator board.

I'd worry, using a PC (or Mac, or Linux box) in any live-show environment. They're so damn fragile and sensitive to their environment. An Amiga 1200 will happily run in environments a Panasonic Toughbook would balk at.

The lack of memory protection never really was a big problem during the heights of the Amiga's reign. The Amiga was successful despite never coming as standard with a CPU equipped with an MMU, a feature which is an absolute necessity, these days.

*Developing* software on an MMU-equipped Amiga was a bonus. You were able to run 'enforcer' in the background to catch calls to uninitialised pointers. You could also see other people's programs misbehaving (e.g. MaxsBBS, anyone remember that?).

The greatest thing the Amiga had was a really elegant set of API's coupled with extensive documentation. Can you imagine how different the computing scene would be today if Nvidia and ATI routinely pushed out comprehensive hardware docs?

Imagine as well how much speed we would be able to eke out of software if we were able to dump (most of) the OS and hit the hardware, or at least drop into a single-tasking mode?

Since none of this is ever likely to happen, we will just have to live with OS overhead, unpredictable CPU-cache states and a reliance on closed-source hardware drivers.