The following is not a rant, more an observation and frustration of going into a new culture and a new way of doing things. Thought I'd spill my mind and share with you lot

I'm working in an office environment, full of people who say the computer is broken and call for help when it's not, in fact, plugged in. This is a huge contrast to working in an environment where my customers are more technically minded that me (well, in most cases).
Today, after three days of waiting for a log in and then another day waiting for the password someone forgot to attach to the email, I got access to the computer system where I'm working. I was given a security brief just before, and was given some security stuff to read and sign. As I read about it I noticed that it contradicted itself, it said I should not make my password available to other uses, however, in the next clause it went on to say that I could write my password down and put it in an envelope marked restricted, which anyone in my department can look at If I add the word "personal" then they can't, but anyone higher up than me can...All very odd.

I then get logged in, the first log in takes me into several windows popping up with lots of loading bars, I then get plonked into XP's Explorer. Before I can use it, I've got to log off and wait 20 minutes...
Anyhoo, I do as I'm told and busy myself with some other things, finally logging into my account which is quite snappy. From there, the speed ends, this 2.3 GHz Core2Duo machine equipped with 1GB of RAM crawls opening applications like Outlook or even just and Explorer window, the machine is running XP SP3.

I fire up outlook (2003), and it's a mess, a preview pane on the right hand side that I really don't want, but I have to disable it for each individual folder , following some instructions it instructs how to make a button that allows emails to be sent externally, and there is a text box in a friggin' menu! WTF, who came up with this design!?
Outlook's toolbar is too small at 1600x???? resolution, so I asked it to use large icons, but they all pixelate! Looks horrible.
When composing an email it won't auto-look in Active Directory and auto-complete addresses, which is quite alien coming from Thunderbird.

I can't get used to Explorer, windows don't snap into place like they do in GNOME, there are no workspaces and no sloppy focus, I've already got frustrated that I have to click on a window to scroll in it, reading emails to do with a Word document will be a chore.

My last gripe is Windows isn't mobile. Sure I can log into another computer and get my documents, but I can't continue where I left off, because logging off the first computer closes all applications And if it's the first time I've logged onto that computer, it takes a few minutes to set up local files. Settings aren't remembered from computer to computer either, meaning I'd have to fiddle with things to make it half bearable every time I move.

After talking to the department head, he doesn't like it, talking to other people they don't like it, but I think it's less frustrating for them because they don't know of anything different.
Standalone machines are of little use in a normal office environment I feel, especially where "hot desking" is employed, it just isn't flexible enough.

Anyhoo, that's my head empty now, it's odd working in a different environment, where nobody really has any control over their data and how they operate.
If I'm lucky enough to be picky when it comes to jobs in the future, I'd rather not be on the receiving end of a bad IT strategy, and I'd rather not work in the Microsoft environment, you can achieve the same things in similar ways, but the whole concept is completely different in my mind...

Why would you actively avoid a whole platform? In most situations, Microsoft is the way to go because people know it.

If you pounce on a load of users with an alien platform then they won't be happy, and they'll be unproductive. It would also cost a fortune in training. :/

I agree that Windows can be infuriating though. I find it hard to switch to Windows. One thing that really irritates me is how it can be so fickle.

Upgrade users to Vista from XP and they'll complain, other alternatives aren't that much different, look at KDE and the XP Explorer, switch users to that instead of the upgrade to Vista and they'll still complain. Your user base is going to be unhappy with any change, so unless you want to stand still, you've got to make them unhappy.

People know Windows, it's widely available, but that doesn't mean it's automatically the best platform to use under any circumstance, certainly from what I've seen of XP, it's just no where near flexible enough in a corporate environment, especially when the customer want to lock it down and try to make it their own.

At the end of the day, I'd venture to say it's only people like us that need retraining for other platforms, most people will grumble for a bit and then just get on with it.

Sweet baby Jebus! What have these people been doing to their Windows deployment?

I use XP at work and the experience couldn't be more different from the one you describe (apart from the lack of mobility).
My desktop machine is an oldish Dell Pentium 4 box with 1GB of ram and it's perfectly happy and plenty fast enough for what I use it for. And it's pretty tightly screwed down by the IT department but it's still perfectly usable (and a vast improvement over the screamingly slow Windows 95 set-up we used to use (there was a bit of Windows 2000 in the middle but not for everything)).

It sounds like whoever set up the Windows system at your work has borked it rather badly rather than any significant inherent problems with the platform itself.

This puzzles me. Are you suggesting that on other OS, if you log off a machine the applications not only continue to run but you will automatically be able to see them on a different machine? On which box do the applications actually run?

To do that under Windows, you'd have to be in a terminal server environment. The applications run on the server, and you can log on from any machine. Provided you close the terminal session rather than log out, then "your applications will continue to run in the background". When you open a terminal session on any workstation, you would expect to be able to log back in within about 1 second and continue where you left off. This might include your PC at home, or anywhere with VPN access.

Logging out of Windows always closes all applications in that session. If you need them to continue, then either lock your work station or close your terminal session.

All your other complaints simply sound like it's not been implemented in a sensible way. Unfortunately, this is very common. Often it's a result of people "above" making "executive decisions" without understanding the consequences. A good example is insisting AV run at "maximum security" so every file is scanned all the time. This results in applications taking many thousands of time longer to load, even on the most powerful PC in the world. I like to keep task manager open all the time, and it's quite common to see the AV running using an entire core and completely preventing Windows from responding for up to 20 minutes. Without the AV, the application would open in a few milliseconds. Last week, Sophos and McAffee were not my friends.

That sounds like a much better alternative than to have a whole separate box on your desk, for general office use at least.



Well that's the government for you
As I said, I'm really not trying to have a go at Windows, you've all read my posts and know I find it hard to convey my whole meaning, it was just the frustrations of the new environment, the new employer may have set it all up wrong, though personally I think that's what they get for outsourcing such a vital service to a contractor...

Sounds a bit like my previous experience of office based Windows systems. My last exposure to it was it at Activision. A combination of a Dell with 512MB of RAM, XP sp2, constantly running out of server space, intrusive AV software, and Acrobat.
Thankfully, we weren't hot desking.
Interestingly, the two heads of the department had OS X on G5s.

When ever you change a significant element of an environment you are comfortable in ( IT or not ) it is always disconcerting to start with.



Oy watch it. Generally the customer doesn't have a clue and brings in an expert ( contractor ) to sort out their problems, which are normally created by their own IT dept " a little knowledge is dangerous"



Generally I find its the network that causes the problems especially if hot desking with profiles that haven't been configured properly. If you allow people to put 1Gb + size files on their desktops you are going to have problems and in media environment that happens far more frequently that you might imagine.

I'd suggest that in media environments which are dealing with 1GB files, hot desking isn't a realistic approach.

Realistic or not sadly I know of at least one where, roaming profiles ( equivalent to hot desking )is the standard.

In my albeit limited experience, the consumer has been much happier when they own the IT. As I said, I have very limited experience, but my old school did as much of their own IT as they could, then they switched to a contractor and everyone felt the quality of service wasn't as good because compromises were made to make sure outsourcing was the cheaper option, I believe the same has happened where I am now, I know they did their own It at one time, then it was taken out of the hands of the company owned experts, and given to external experts...

My old Athlon XP 1.6Ghz machine, with 486MB RAM was running XP SP 3 and it was sluggish, but not slower than what you describe. The 2.1Ghz C2D machine at my last place was quick, certainly I couldn't notice any performance difference between it and the Linux machine next to it (same hardware).

I currently have Vista and OS X sitting next to each other and, once the machines have finished booting, there isn't a lot of difference in performance loading and using "normal" applications.

I would think it is much more down to the configuration of the machine and what other junk they have in the startup.

The resuming applications thing is something that KDE does. The applications don't continue to run, but when you log off, it stores a list of what applications were open, and where possible, which documents. This is similar to the Autostart folder in Windows or the flag you can set on icons in the OS X dock - apart from it is dynamic, OS X and Windows start what they are told to start, KDE (and Gnome?) create the list based on what was running when the user logged out.

It is very useful, but it does slow down the boot up and logon process. I used to have all my commonly used apps set up to load on OS X, but the amount of disk thrashing as the OS tried to load everything at the same time slowed the machine to a crawl. I therefore got rid of it and start the programs manually as I need them, the system is much more responsive after login, with only calendar and mail opening...

I worked somewhere where we had roaming profiles on Windows. I have no idea why, as we didn’t do hot desking. I was pretty much Mac based anyway, and used Windows for testing and email (Macs could not talk to Exchange back then).

The roaming profile always seemed to take about an hour to page in and out. For some reason, the PC I used never just shut down or started up - it took about 2 minutes to shunt the data to/from the server. Roaming profiles can, it seems, bloat to massive sizes.

One of the biggest problems is if the administrators leave the "My Documents" directory local. They should re-map it to a network drive, with offline caching.

The problem is, the more you store locally in "My Documents" etc. the longer it will take you to log on/off, because it has to synchronise.

A mixture of poor administration and poor user training is usually at fault when it comes to the log on times on a domain network.

Big_D's points really chime with me. My experience is limited but it was partly in a small company where I was the 'guru' and learning on the job. You can easily really screw up log in times and following the MS rule book is a good way to do it. So is silly AV use. I had my network behind a solid firewall, a Smoothwall box, with only email scanned and never had a virus problem. That was pretty essential given the low hardware power of the individual computers and the sole Win2003 server. I'm now at another location where a 'party line' administrator has a fancy log in script etc but the machines given their processor and memory are slow to log in and slow to log out with multiple errors so you have to watch and click close or it won't finish logging out. Silly, silly, silly. An administrator who passed an MCSA module or two rather than a genuine administrator. And yes part of the problem is they don't properly map 'My Documents' as Big_D describes and that's plain dumb as I learned the hard way.

Richard.