Microsoft offers to just 'Fix it'

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GNU/Linux is a good fix for that other OS

I have implemented these steps hundreds of times for my employers. It works well, but, to reduce licensing issues and to avoid anything rising from the grave of the hard drives, I recommend a wipe:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda or whatever.

Where I work, we are about to convert a room full of XP machines into GNU/Linux thin clients. We will go from 3 minute boot times to 35s and login will be about 2s instead of an eternity. We have worked out a very simple conversion process:
1)move everything to one switch
2)netboot from a floppy with appropriate ethernet drivers
3)a script on the server wipes the drives and pushes a bootloader onto MBR
4)reboot remotely

Total time is two hours. The result will be vastly improved performance with only the addition of one redeployed server. GNU/Linux is an incredibly flexible operating system and gives great price/performance ratios. The machines I will fix were running 2000 when new. Now they are running XP with AV stuff and network file shares that are dog slow. By asking them to show the pictures and to receive the clicks they can continue to give years of good service for very little cost. If we replaced them with Vista the cost would be hundreds of times greater and the performance no better. ROI=value/cost=$400X24/$200=48! in just two hours.

I will do this project with an old terminal server. It is perfectly adequate for 35 simultaneous users. It is being replaced in its present role with a new quad-core machine that I recently showed off at a conference. People could not believe the magic their eyes were seeing, one machine doing the work of many. GNU/Linux is so efficient at multi-tasking, those from the world of that other OS cannot imagine their machines, struggling to please one user, could do that, but that other OS is MIPS-eating as intended by the Wintel monopoly.

Posted by: pogson   Posted on: 03/05/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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