I'm a nerd. A pretty good nerd. And I also pride myself on my skills in troubleshooting and squeezing ever last ounce of power out of a machine. I am also a nerd by trade. I work as a network administrator for a fairly large commercial roofing company.
We have a small fleet 100 or so, Dell machines that we deployed a year or so ago. Processors ranging from Celeron 700s to Celeron 1.1ghz. All with 256megs of ram, all with good size drives, and all with Windows 98se (because the MIS manager didn't want 2k and didn't like the sound of XP). Fine....we had some growing pains, but I was able to milk every last bit of power and resources out of the machine to run our corporate apps, but now, it seems, that we can barely move with these machines.
A couple new apps were deployed last fall. One big one being a new SAP client. This wreaks havoc on 98....you open it and Notes and your resources drop around 50%. This and our users open 2 or 3 sessions of SAP, Word, IE, Excel, Notes, and then wonder why their computer is constantly locking up. Some of these poor dells are even beginning to choke just at one or 2 apps open. Of course I get yelled at. Our users hate the machines, my managers look at me to fix them and patch them but are slowly realizing there is nothing we can do, and we are stuck with these machines until the lease is up in 2 years. I keep trying to tell people its not the Dell's fault, its the OS not liking our Apps, but that doesn't help.
This got me to thinking. Win98se is a preferred gaming platform. In fact, alot of people swear still by it and use it only. How can it be that I can load Quake 3, have Winamp playing in the background, and still pull down stuff from Kazaa? Why is it that I can bitchslap a 98 around with gaming but the minute i throw out a few business apps on it, it curls up into a ball?
Just odd, from my point of view....
We have a small fleet 100 or so, Dell machines that we deployed a year or so ago. Processors ranging from Celeron 700s to Celeron 1.1ghz. All with 256megs of ram, all with good size drives, and all with Windows 98se (because the MIS manager didn't want 2k and didn't like the sound of XP). Fine....we had some growing pains, but I was able to milk every last bit of power and resources out of the machine to run our corporate apps, but now, it seems, that we can barely move with these machines.
A couple new apps were deployed last fall. One big one being a new SAP client. This wreaks havoc on 98....you open it and Notes and your resources drop around 50%. This and our users open 2 or 3 sessions of SAP, Word, IE, Excel, Notes, and then wonder why their computer is constantly locking up. Some of these poor dells are even beginning to choke just at one or 2 apps open. Of course I get yelled at. Our users hate the machines, my managers look at me to fix them and patch them but are slowly realizing there is nothing we can do, and we are stuck with these machines until the lease is up in 2 years. I keep trying to tell people its not the Dell's fault, its the OS not liking our Apps, but that doesn't help.
This got me to thinking. Win98se is a preferred gaming platform. In fact, alot of people swear still by it and use it only. How can it be that I can load Quake 3, have Winamp playing in the background, and still pull down stuff from Kazaa? Why is it that I can bitchslap a 98 around with gaming but the minute i throw out a few business apps on it, it curls up into a ball?
Just odd, from my point of view....
