09-05-2014, 04:31 AM
Bimwad wrote:
It doesn't really affect my productivity in the strictest sense, it's just mostly an annoyance :-)
It is a small office, and IT is handled by a part-time consultant. A lot of times, I'm the one providing basic IT support for more common issues when required. I don't mess with the server setup, network configuration, and things like that, nor do I have a desire to.
Past practice when any problems struck was to physically swap out a machine, and leave the problematic one in a corner to be attended to later, even for the smallest issues. Personally, outside of hardware failure, I see physical swaps as a last resort, and try to rectify the problem so that the user doesn't have to reconfigure. I like to tweak my tools to a high degree, so there's even less desire on my part to resort to drastic measures, unless absolutely required. No such luxuries as preconfigured disk images to work with. I don't even know where half the software licenses originate from.
Considering the circumstances, stuff still works fine most of the time. But those making the ultimate IT decisions don't understand technology, or have just enough knowledge to be dangerous.
As for the machine, it's an old Dell with ~3GHz C2D, and 2GB of RAM. The 320GB drive is less than 1/3 full. Not the latest and greatest, but it did seem to run Win 7 decently before and is perfectly adequate for general office tasks. I do have admin access.
A machine of that era should take either 4 or 8 gigs of RAM, and its pretty cheap. A solid state hard drive would help too.