That's not a new problem either: back in the day when I worked in a Jaguar garage I tuned and serviced an aging but much loved Series II XJ6. On the test drive, when full throttle is used from a rolling start, the throttle jammed open on over run at about 100 km/h. Quite exciting. The pedal lifted from the floor a bit but felt dead...

I braked heavily, the transmission kicked down a gear or two and we kept going - which was not in the plan, so I turned the ignition off instead.

Subsequent roadside inspection revealed that the throttle shaft between the two carburettors had worn through the plastic bushings and made a significant groove in the mounting plate. The throttle shaft itself has two flattened sections that engage in spring plates and stuff, and one was close enough to drop into the worn groove - but only at full throttle. It needed a good firm tug in the right direction to disengage it.

The owners had little chance to encounter this, being old and cautious and spending most of their time in suburban and inner city traffic: not a place where you need to use full throttle. A holiday trip to the country was on the cards though, and it could have become an issue on Australia's long but narrow (single lane each way) highways where overtaking sojourns onto the wrong side of the road are required - and not a place where you hang about so full throttle at 100/kmh + is the norm...

I'm glad we found it, and it became part of our service routine for that model thereafter. We never found another like it, but found a few that were on the way.

Judging from the comment above I guess there's still some evolution to come on the whole throttle control and maintenance issue.

Agreed. Practicality aside, go for a uniform (company provided if you can swing it) that implies that you are a cut above, rather than two cuts below, the average joe.

If you accept that dressing like a janitor or a sanitation engineer is appropriate then go and do that.

Good help desk staff are professionals and multi-talented, technically adept and great judges of character and students of human nature: who else can placate the irate and fat fingered? Wear a suit, and when you have fixed the problem and are giving them the wind-up speech (what, why, who and now I'm leaving to do important and mysterious stuff) ensure they are sitting at their desk and you are standing, and they're looking up to you.

The natural order of things.

I've just been through this whole charade while replicating an image for a local community centre; Not my field, but I'd been around and had sat through a few deployment meetings in a previous life. It was identical hardware so I was fairly confident I could pull it off. I found Microsoft's documentation on replication and digested it. I ran sysprep and discovered that not only did it completely remove Microsoft's own SteadyState, but it destroyed the customisation I'd spent hours crafting for my end users. There's more to it than that, but that was the guts of it. I restored from backup and moved on...

I did some more research, downloaded NewSID, read the documentation and decided that the scenarios alluded to didn't apply and it was all a lot of messing about for no good reason. In fact, I decided on my own volition that it was all a crock of shit.

I "rolled it out" to use the parlance of the day, and it's fine. Imaging and renaming the computer takes 5 minutes. It works, it prints, it does internet.

I'm marking this one up as a triumph of common sense and practicality tempered by evidential results, over complexity, self-serving bullshit and FUD - vindicated after the event by this article.

HP are good at this: they shipped my DC7900s with Vista installed and a recovery partition, but include an XP downgrade and media in the box. They don't include the backup manager on the install disks though - you have to ring them and beg for it.

If you run the recovery media, it wipes the drive and reformats it without the recovery partition. Your system is restored, but not to the state it was in when you bought it, but to someone else's idea of a good time.

You can boot from the XP media and start to install from it, but you get the BSOD when it tries to write to the SATA drive. If you set it to IDE emulation it installs, but if you set it back to SATA when you've finished (including the latest firmware and drivers) it won't boot. If you nLite it and include the ICH10 drivers it installs fine, but then you can't activate Windows because downgrades don't include a licence to use the software that came in the box: you have to use the recovery media and install all the crapware and then cut it out afterwards.

Boot times were 50% slower than a bare XP install and the subsequent image is 1.5GB larger and god knows what vulnerabilities it still has because of the latent garbage left behind that I got tired of hunting down and killing.

They call these Business PCs as well - I'd hate to see what the consumer line is like...