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Comment Kids today... (Score 1) 857

Know nothing of the pain of loading software off cassette at 300 bits per second (roughly 30 cps - you could read the software as it was loading...)

How's this for OLD?

Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P Superboard.

My father bought this in like 1978. It was his for a few minutes,

I still have it. It still works. It has the 610 board with a mind-blowing 24 KILOBYTES of additional memory to the stock 8. I now "import" software via a PC's sound card, as there is no disk drive.

I also have a C2P with dual disk drives...

Comment Bad practice not going with a 24 hour burn-in... (Score 1) 236

Epic FAIL - not bothering to bench burn-in any change in system hardware.

I've been building PC's for well over 25 years, starting with my empty case IBM PC 5150 (no drives, cards - nothing but 64k soldered on the system board).

First test - TEST! Then, test it again.

I currently use PC-Check to run a diag for a minimum of 24 hours. This does nothing more than to check if you're going to release any "magic smoke" because of an assembly failure.

After that, I load the OS.

I had an old Novell-brand 386 server (yes - they rebranded hardware back in the 2.12 SFT days) that had a bad CPU, but, only intermittently. Worked great when cold, would lock up dead after 10 - 15 minutes, but not all of the time. We replaced the server, I took the old one home, popped in another 386-16MHz (yes - the days of unbridled power!) and it worked flawlessly 24x7 for 8 years until it got too old to bother with and chucked into the shitcan.

Test and test again. That helps ensure your 5 9's of availability!

Comment Re:Only management is fooled (Score 1) 344

Not where I work...

I'm already being asked "When are we going to be testing Windows 8?" - my reply - "When it's time".

I get thrown into the fire daily (note my spiffy asbestos drawers), and am expected to answer PHB's moronic questions without even being able to research it.

*I* make it work wherever possible. Like I stated earlier - thankfully, everything we and our sibling co's do is C/S via browser. Our biggest enterprise app is Outlook. Everything else is run on a hodge-podge of some sh!t that is older than I am.

We still have one mainframe that I swear has vacuum tubes in it... We could have had Programming write middleware to convert that database to SQL or whatever - nah... Let's pay a sh!tload of money for support we rarely use and suck up nearly 1.21 gigawatts of electricity a month!

Hey - it keeps my lunch warm!

Comment Re:Only management is fooled (Score 1) 344

AC's are all idiots. Post your name, or wallow in your own crapulence...

That being said - the beta machine has been wiped and repurposed, as the beta is done. Are you really that f^cking stupid? Sorry - I forgot. AC. A$$hole Commenter.

The RC's are still operating until that dies in March-ish. I have three or four machines in approximately 4,000 that are still running it. Haven't had a chance to get back to them to re-image the machines, so, they stay until I get time.

Oh, and learn English. Your diction is horrible.

Your statements prove you've never worked in the real IT world. This happens all of the time. It's why our parent company pays the extra M$ tax for support. How do you test desktop/laptop OS's in a non-production environment needing to work with production systems?

You don't. You limit the number of test machines, address issues as the pop up, have monthly meetings with those people, form your rollout plan and rollout...

Comment Re:Only management is fooled (Score 1) 344

First rule of UAC : DISABLE IT

I have no UAC on my 3 machines that run Win7 Enterprise and simply put - no issues. If you *KNOW* what you're doing - it's not an issue!

Granted - my 20+ years in the PC/LAN service industry has something to do with it. For end-users - leave it, as they're 99 44/100% idiots.

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