TexasCHLforum.com

Dad24GreatKids wrote: This sounds a lot like a trading company. Many require that you take at least two consecutive weeks in order to see if you've been doing something that you shouldn't be...

Close. We are a bank and that is exactly why they do it.

C-dub wrote: We're not the government, but are heavily regulated by them and several other groups.

HEHEHE Here is one for you. About November basically most of the IT staff goes on vacation and doesn't come back until January. Why? because the internal and external auditors sweep through during December and they don't want the IT staff around while they poke and prod everything. If you are a full time employee who has more than 2 weeks of vacation and you are taking more than three vacation days in a month it is HIGHLY recommended that you take a whole 2 weeks. This is so that they can uncover any issues!

lrpettit wrote: So now that security support for Windows XP is going away you'll be upgrading all of those users to Windows 8? What an awesome project!

Nope... We are a bank. Things like this come slowly. We are moving to Windows 7. I figure Windows 8 is probably a few years down the road at least...

lrpettit wrote: MACs in a very large environment (like you have) are somewhat problematic when the IT department wants to maintain them, lock them down, and control updates. That's something that is a little easier in the PC environment but it is still doable in the MAC environment.

Bank... When you ask for Chrome they look at you like their world is coming to an end

lrpettit wrote: (although her iPad really does almost everything she has a need to do).

Love my iPad! However, it wont replace my latop. I miss my mouse! Funny is when I sit down at my laptop and start trying to drag icons across the screen with my finger!

lrpettit wrote:The two environments can coexist on the same network (even on the same machine). Buy the hammer that's the right one to get the job done but chances are either hammer will get the nail where it needs to be. It's mostly personal preference with no right or wrong answer.

E2P989 wrote: but a lot of it is software too. People can greatly increase their boot up times by disabling services they never use and background programs that load at start up which is supposeded to make other things load faster, but if you never use those things, you don't need them.

The iTunes installer comes with a lot of extra add-ons, but a majority of people don't need them. The packages for each part can be extracted from the installer and installed separately. MAC users complain of "bloat" on Windows computers, but I find it ironic that Apple is a cause of some of that bloat.

+1

I like to tweak my system. Hence the case I have for it. My wife got tired of my PC's laying out on my desk in pieces. I loved it I can swap out components when i wanted to and I could see all of my hardware. She finally made me get a case. I said any case? and she said fine any case as long as it collects everything in to one spot. When I built it in the new case she looked at it rolled her eyes and walked away. YES fight won!!!

The Annoyed Man wrote: ...except that Apple doesn't hate you, and you don't suck.

Yeah but with HK you can be a Manly Tuetonic Operator!!!

and i like HK even if they don't like me!

fickman wrote: If you compare oranges to oranges, $3,000 worth of high end PC hardware will last as long as an Apple. Comparing a $500 desktop to a $3,000 Apple is unfair. Most anecdotes I've heard from friends and family are doing this.

Also, I've had the opposite experience with software. I have two Apples from '06 that are essentially worthless because the software is no longer supported. Yet, I'm still using a well-functioning PC from 2002 that is running Windows XP and hasn't skipped a beat. BTW, that PC has never had a virus or a blue screen, either. Apple also charges mightily for feature upgrades to the OS. . . on devices and computers.

No thanks.

I currently administer networks for a company with 6000 desktops. We also currently run 1400+ servers (we have a high security and retail exposure so we have LOTS of redundancy) I have 8 Compaq DL380's running Windows 2000 that have not been turned off since they were purchased in 2001. We don't have anything critical on those boxes because they are not fault tolerant but they are still running. The LARGE majority of the company is still running boxes about 4 years old on Windows XP. We have some Windows 7 boxes. If you buy higher end hardware and maintain them right they just keep running.

Also we have a lot of database work, both Access and SQL Server. Yes I can run those in Parallels but the performance hit is too much. Also why would I go buy a Mac with OSX and Parallels or Bootcamp and a copy of Windows. Why not just buy a PC with Windows and cut out the expensive middle man.

Then you bring Internet Explorer. IE is the default browser of business. We access so many applications and portals using the web browser and we are a retail establishment and most of our customers use IE so we use IE.

Then you have to factor in items like our screen scraping and voice recording technology for the call center, High Speed High Volume printing and scanning because our Ocee and Xerox IGen4 document production facilities are all PC run.

At home I have a self built PC running Windows Vista since 2008 with nary a problem. Runs all the time. Right now I have several spreadsheets open, more then a few browser sessions, a game of Call of Duty Modern Warfare, a game of Mini Ninjas and probably my Tivo video app running. It is a Intel Q6600 Core 2 Quad with 4 gig of ram and a Geforce 8800 GTX video card. So no ultra crazy specs. Cost me about $1200 to put together in 2008. I will probably upgrade the video card this year sometime but the rest of the box is rock solid. It's still snappy in performance. Takes 23 seconds from the time I push the power button until I have a desktop.

My wife looked at replacing her PC with a Mac because she likes the Mac. I do too its visually very appealing. Also she runs Adobe CS4 and does creative stuff but in order to replace all of her software was going to cost about 8000 AFTER we had purchased a new Mac...

PC for me...