MFW my new work PC has a Nvidia GT 210 from 2009

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Ugh, can't stand to use work provided peripherals.
Brought my own cables, USB DAC/amp, KB, mouse, etc.

 

[WackyDan]

This is what makes me nervous about working anywhere else.
Everything and Agent Ransack: They're everything that Windows 7's search tool could have been, but failed at. Agent Ransack brings back the functionality of Windows XP's very usable search interface. Everything indexes a drive and allows simple and instant searches. Both tools have made it a lot quicker to find files, especially when looking for old projects that are buried in archive folders.

Firefox: 1) I can use Firefox - IT greatly prefers it. 2) I can install extensions that make it usable. I use more than 25 extensions at work and at home. (I don't know that a plain installation of Firefox gives much benefit over IE.)

7+ Taskbar Tweaker: Makes the Windows 7 taskbar into a properly usable one again, and adds additional functionality.

I can edit the registry to add custom right-click functionality in Explorer to make it quicker to perform certain repetitive things.

WinRAR: Excellent file compression utility, easy splitting of files (7MB limit on file extensions), and a nice interface. Okay, so 7-zip offers some of that too, though without the addition of any parity information like WinRAR does, and I much prefer WinRAR's interface.


My experience with restrictive IT policies is like saying "If I had a larger hammer, a different kind of workbench vice, and a #3 Philips head screwdriver, I could be 20% more efficient at this job," but being told that policy forbids those tools, and I have to keep doing it the hard way. Work harder, not smarter, despite the mantra that management keeps repeating.


But....I'm sure most people would use such freedom to download 10 toolbars, 7 new spyware-laden media players, and adware-filled games.



Hardware: There have been swap-outs of RAM and motherboards because the official channels never got around to replacing it. (The computer wasn't completely disabled. It would just crash every one or two hours because the damaged section of RAM was accessed, which is of course a drag on productivity.) Approval was quietly received from local management, parts were ordered, and the damaged equipment was replaced in the shadows.

We've also outfitted some of the systems with isolated USB hubs and serial interfaces to try to prevent these sorts of problems. When testing with things like power supply designs or other mains-powered prototypes, it's possible to accidentally connect things incorrectly. 5V USB signal lines don't usually like seeing a surge of 392VDC from the rectified input section of a 277VAC power supply. It would likely have taken months to get official approval to buy a $400 (isolated) USB hub, even though the thing would pay for itself the first time there was an accidental connection.

In a call center, the users get the apps you publish and that is it. They don't need anything else to boost productivity.

For day to day business users, you have to allow some flexibility. My current company is 400,000 employees. No Domain. Yes... No domain. We are admins on our endpoints, ****BUT we are still profiled and still have policy imparted via a variety of tools both commercial and in house custom. There is literally ZERO way around IT policy if you want to be able to use your machine. We can install our own apps though and they will nail you it is on the blacklist. So I can have Firefox, Chrome, my preferred version of office (company standard is an open source office product), etc.

When I wrote that policy at the other company, it was 2000/2001 and there was rampant file sharing which was garbaging all the machines up, etc... These machines weren't just for getting email, but also for conducting technology demos. They had to be reliable and had to perform or our client would be pissed.

 

[Smoblikat]

Fun fact: Pretty sure the HD4670 is the fastest AGP card ever made. Not that these young whippersnappers even know what AGP is..........

 

[Jeff7]

You need a better college.

My school was on a 4 year cycle.

Those were new systems. The entire building was a newly-built addition to the campus, specifically for business and engineering. (They hoped that the engineers and business students would mingle and they'd each simply absorb the attributes of the other. It was more like oil and water, with some mutual dislike built in.)
Brand spankin' new systems, projectors in every room, motorized roll-down projection screens, all kinds of fancy stuff. I assume that someone who had never done 3D CAD work was picking out computer hardware.

If I was heading up IT, you'd all (unless you're doing intensive work) would get a Haswell Celeron, 4 GB RAM, and a 64 GB SSD preloaded with Win 7. Speedy enough for basic tasks, and fast boots and shutdowns so the dregs can get to work faster, and keep working for a tad longer, in addition to speedy image recovery in case a user is doing something he\she\it shouldn't be doing.

Sod off. I'm not a bloody secretary. I need the display real estate, RAM, etc. to do physical design and physical design flow development (regression runs, etc.)

For many people, that'd probably be ok. I see a lot of people who have 1 or maybe 2 programs open at a time.

Doing something in Excel, but then need PowerPoint? Save work in Excel, open PowerPoint, do a few clicks there, save and close, open Excel.

Firefox: A surprising number of people don't know what "tabs" are, or that you can have multiple browser windows open at once.

My approach: 2 monitors is ok. I'd prefer four. A lot of my job takes place in the virtual world of the computer's OS and the server. All I've got are two ~24" windows into that world. It's ok most of the time, but if I'm working on a circuitboard that has to fit into an enclosure that's also in the design stage, or a program for a microcontroller that has 25 I/O pins in use, while also taking phonecalls or having to manage inventory change requests every 5-15 minutes, 2 monitors can be restrictive.


But, an SSD alone would be very useful for many of the non-power-users. I can load a program in 5 seconds that would take 60 seconds on some of the older PCs - or load Pro/Engineer, Adobe Illustrator, Outlook, and Firefox in rapid succession, and have it all take less time than it'd take for a mechanical hard drive to open Firefox alone.



I suppose some of it has to be at the department manager's discretion, though many places like zero-tolerance/no-thought types of policies, where everything is kept the same, even when it doesn't make sense. Most people at work have $2 mice, like something cheap you'd get free in a box of cereal. I have a G700s mouse so that I could make use of the programmable buttons, and the department manager knew how quickly I can use a computer.

That mouse got the 2D CAD guys riled up, because they had the cheap standard mice too. The ensuing political disruption ended up with them getting some very nice gaming mice that featured an array of buttons on the side, which resulted in an increase in efficiency for that department. They made custom bindings where a single button-press would execute as many as a few dozen keystrokes instantly. Layer-switching or special group-rotation operations or repetitive script execution would now take a fraction of a second instead of 5-10 seconds each time. You're welcome, I guess?

The people who don't need that kind of mouse generally recognize it themselves: "Oh my god, I didn't know you could get mice with so many buttons." Then after I explain all the key bindings I have set up: "How do you even remember all that?"

 

[Aikouka]

Fun fact: Pretty sure the HD4670 is the fastest AGP card ever made. Not that these young whippersnappers even know what AGP is..........

If you want to raise your "Get off my lawn!" status, you should have gone with ISA instead.

EDIT:

But, an SSD alone would be very useful for many of the non-power-users. I can load a program in 5 seconds that would take 60 seconds on some of the older PCs - or load Pro/Engineer, Adobe Illustrator, Outlook, and Firefox in rapid succession, and have it all take less time than it'd take for a mechanical hard drive to open Firefox alone.

I've been using SSDs since Intel's X25-M G2, which makes using the HDD-equipped work machines a real chore sometimes.

 

[BoberFett]

But....I'm sure most people would use such freedom to download 10 toolbars, 7 new spyware-laden media players, and adware-filled games.

Of course this is why corporate IT are such pricks about it. Most users are morons and will screw up their machines.

My teams have more flexibility with their computers because they need it to manage the network, systems, and applications. But typical users don't need that, and have the locked down systems to reflect that.

How can IT possibly test every piece of crapware some individual user wants because they use it at home and the bestest app evar! IT is responsible for making sure the organization runs, not the individual. From malware to license management problems to bandwidth hogs, IT needs to have control at some level so we're not managing thousands of custom setups.

 

[edro]

Everything and Agent Ransack: They're everything that Windows 7's search tool could have been, but failed at. Agent Ransack brings back the functionality of Windows XP's very usable search interface. Everything indexes a drive and allows simple and instant searches. Both tools have made it a lot quicker to find files, especially when looking for old projects that are buried in archive folders.

I use Index Your Files. It is a simple free application.
Everything and Agent Ransack look similar.

It is awesome for finding network files.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Unless you're talking thin clients that connect to RDGateway/XenDesktop, you'd be a buffoon.

So essentially, you're going to pay staff $30k-100k and have them work from a $300 machine? I'm not sure you under stand cost saving, but that ain't a good way to do it. If you make your employees less efficient by giving them slower machines, well, in my opinion, that just isn't bright.

Sure, most menial tasks are fine. But anything where it slows productivity down... doesn't make a lot of sense. And just to be clear, I am not suggesting staff needs an i7 with 32GB of RAM and an ultra SSD, but bare minimum specs are pretty ridiculous for someone you are paying far more than the cost of that hardware.

Of course I'm talking about menial ~min wage assemblers that simply use the pc to connect to our web based inventory software (we do not need bloody i7s just to tell a server that we have used a part or three.) The machine I specced above will be far more than sufficient for that use.

On the otherhand, we also have engineers (some cad users), accountants and such that do need more powerful machines, and so they'd get them, no question asked. I'm just a little irked that our non power users can get a much better experience via ssd, but instead get quad cores that won't ever go beyond 10% utilization.

 

[midwestfisherman]

Wow...some of you guys have some crappy machines to work on.

I have a desktop and a laptop.

Desktop:
HP Z620
Processor: Xeon E5-1620 4C 3.60 10MB 1600 CPU
Memory: 32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 SDRAM 4 Dimms
Hard Drive: (1) 128 GB Solid-State Drive (SSD) SATA III, (2) 256 GB Solid-State Drive (SSD) SATA III
Video: NVIDIA Quadro 2000D DVI

Laptop:
HP EliteBook 8470P
Core i5-3360M Ivy Bridge CPU
4GB RAM
256GB SSD Hard drive

 

[rudeguy]

Wow...some of you guys have some crappy machines to work on.

I have a desktop and a laptop.

Desktop:
HP Z620
Processor: Xeon E5-1620 4C 3.60 10MB 1600 CPU
Memory: 32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 SDRAM 4 Dimms
Hard Drive: (1) 128 GB Solid-State Drive (SSD) SATA III, (2) 256 GB Solid-State Drive (SSD) SATA III
Video: NVIDIA Quadro 2000D DVI

Laptop:
HP EliteBook 8470P
Core i5-3360M Ivy Bridge CPU
4GB RAM
256GB SSD Hard drive

Yea but we don't have to smell Detroit

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

I used to have a nice HP Z600 (with some upgrades that IT didn't know about )

2x Xeon E5649 (2.53 / 2.93GHz)
24GB
Samsung 840 EVO 240GB (mine)
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB
nVIDIA 660 Ti (mine - original was a crappy Quadro 450)


Then work up and decided that everyone should be issued laptops + docks instead

 

[Childs]

Wow...some of you guys have some crappy machines to work on.

Yeah, its like they work at the DMV or something.

 

[Jeff7]

Wow...some of you guys have some crappy machines to work on.

I have a desktop and a laptop.

Desktop:
HP Z620
Processor: Xeon E5-1620 4C 3.60 10MB 1600 CPU
Memory: 32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 SDRAM 4 Dimms
Hard Drive: (1) 128 GB Solid-State Drive (SSD) SATA III, (2) 256 GB Solid-State Drive (SSD) SATA III
Video: NVIDIA Quadro 2000D DVI

Laptop:
HP EliteBook 8470P
Core i5-3360M Ivy Bridge CPU
4GB RAM
256GB SSD Hard drive

Good lord....what industry are you in?
That PC there would likely be capable of running our entire network, with the addition of several 1TB drives.