Thanks for this comment Phoenix, I appreciate it. I think I'll leave SAN's to you Pre sales and Storage Analysts! The little I had to do with HDS disks made me realise how little I knew! (finding that a lot lately:rolleyes:)

Just corrected that there for you Ryan. XP is perfectly fine - there's absolutely zero compelling reason for me to waste money on a desktop rollout of Win 7 when it doesn't offer me a damn thing that XP doesn't.

I'm also not particularly fond of spending money on training my users to use a new O/S (most of them still can't tell the difference between 'log off' and 'shut down' after using computers for ten years).

Finally, you mentioned earlier that companies 'don'#t like spending money' and used that as a justification for upgrading because they wouldn't want to spend money on a support call to Windows. I've never made a single call to PSS in my working life - so I think 'saving money' for me would involve utilising the perfectly good OS, on perfectly good two year old hardware, for at least another two years.

Now don't get me wrong here, I think Win7 is wicked cool - have been using it since March last year, and installed it the day it was available on my VLK at work, but can anyone give me one single reason why I'd want to spend money (when we workshopped the possibility about two months ago with the finance department when we were budgeting we estimated a desktop refresh to Win7 standard would cost us around £250k-£275k) on an upgrade to WIn7 for the average lUser?

Its probably the sales man in him taking over! I'd be glad if he worked for us! As of next week I'll be working on a contract with 85 thousand nodes so I know for a fact we will squeeze every drop of life out of those XP clients. Even if we had to bring in a team of developers and specialists its still a drop in the ocean compared to a full refresh

Stuart, your exactly right, the majority of migrations I am seeing are not in the realm of 'two year old hardware' though, we are talking about finally getting away from 5+ year old hardware, managed in 90s fashion, running a 9 year old operating system in a 90s fashion!

few administrators measure up to your caliber, meaning few networks and systems have the thought and foresight going into their design and maintenance, these are the cases where XP is a nightmare, and Win7 with some decent back end management improvements could really make a difference

certainly you could buy 7 and roll back, I guess the point is 'why' i could see the compelling reason to do it from Vista, but 7 is robust, it works, and the vendors have finally caught up so stuff works! i don't go around insisting people do refreshes if they don't need to, but if they were to do one and went with XP I would walk away, there is very little business value buying a new desktop/thinclient, paying for 7 anyway, then downgrading to XP just because thats how you have done it for 9 years

I can't imagine you would disagree there :)

Some reasons I am seeing (and these are not all at ONE company so don't think my clients are all just bleeding edge, but various clients are using various features here)

Direct Access - Seriously, see this in action, love it, built on IPv6 tech too!
Branch Cache in Distributed mode, lots of remote sites in places like Idaho, some of which have a handful of users, considerably cheaper than rolling out a Riverbed/WAAS solution to a tiny site
Med-V - XP mode but managed at the enterprise level, nice!
It's supported! - seriously, to most enterprises, that's rather important
It's considerably more secure - you can do a ton to XP to MAKE it secure, but it will never be what Vista and 7 are
UAC - techies hate it, but i've seen it save a lot of peoples butts a lot of the time!

It's finally a platform worth upgrading to, its secure, its robust, and it doesn't perform the way many people found vista to perform, is it worth 300k GBP? that's down to whatever metrics you measure against and the write off period of the investment, but I'm seeing a lot of clients turn around to me and say 'Yes'

Make no mistake, my role may encompass a large portion of presales type work, but i'm ultimatly a solutions architect, that means I spend the majority of my time looking at business needs and reasons, and fit technology and vendors that meet those needs, something my sales people hate (I don't lead with whatever vendor pays them the most)

This is far cry form when i was a red blooded tech, and all i cared about was 'cool shineys'

Please to be giving you very good helpings today, tanjewberrymud.

:eek:

I once had cause to call for activation of Win XP twice in the space of one day, once around lunchtime when this was the voice at the end of the phone and once after 5pm when apparently the call centre had moved....





.... to Wales.

Wow that was a fast move :D

ahhahahahh! :p "My name is 'Adam', how can I to be helping you today?" Adam... riiiiiight... :rolleyes:

Just quickly,

Is the MS Volume Licensing Advisor working for anyone else?

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/licensin...0/default.mspx

whats REALLY funny is when they try and be clever and get your location from your IP and ask you how the weather is in 'someplaceyournot' think they have stopped that for the most part as it backfires so often LOL

We used to joke about the 'crackle button'.
MS would generally transfer you half way round the world on the pretext of 'passing you over to my colleague who very helping you with this technical issue. Tanjew for calling.'

You would eventually get through to the guy who was apparently the oracle of whichever subject you were asking about, at which point the line would disintigrate into static and you'd be reduced to bellowing down the phone while the guy answered as quietly as he could.

You'd put the phone down and say 'I'm not going through all that again!'

Which I imagine is the whole point...

I also had a classic conversation with a young lad on the switchboard at the MS office in Reading.

ME: 'Can you put me through to the complaints department please?'
HIM: 'I'm sorry, we don't actually have a complaints department.' (CUNNING, Microsoft, cunning!)
ME: 'Well, who can I speak to if I've got a complaint?'
HIM: (puzzled silence. A complaint? Surely not.) 'Well, it would depend on what the complaint was regarding.'
ME: 'Software licensing.'
HIM: 'That would be the licensing department.'
ME: 'Great, can you put me through to them?'
HIM: 'Sure, what's it regarding?'
ME: (not sure if he's taking the piss) 'I've got a complaint to make.'
HIM: 'I'm sorry, they don't handle complaints in that department.'

I suppose it's one way to keep your customer satisfaction stats up...

:rolleyes:

I live near reading, I'm more than happy for my complaints department to talk to theirs if you like!

http://www.share-winning.com/xiaoyi/...4034533466.jpg