Two of the five year old computers in the lab have “died” and had to be replaced with P4 machines with XP. Hindsight is 20/20 and my optimal solution would have been to just buy the equivalent replacement motherboard at now discounted prices due to something call RoHS. Rip every connector off it and painstakingly reconnect each one. This however presented a purchasing policy nightmare given the time constraints of “need it yesterday”.
These are of course non-networked engineering machines operated without the internet but performed flawlessly the control of process machines in the lab. The painful part is that a hardware “upgrade” comes with the burden of the software “upgrade”, which I did not desire, need or want after having certified all of the essential timing of IO signals with an oscilloscope.
Well the new faster “upgraded” machine crashes repeatedly due to the bloated XP operating system plus insufficient memory. It fails to run the programs which ran perfectly on the older “inferior” machine plus has the added annoyance of continuously asking to be net connected. Plus the other things it just does, but why know not yet why.
The “firewall” blocks/delays/barfs out a needed firewire camera. The “obsolete” driver could only be obtained from the manufacturer after the certification of my valid license and hours on the phone.
I am also not totally convinced that the frequent changes of hardware cards and configurations required by the nature of what our lab does will forever be a total pain in the ass and require that illegible incoherent phone call to India to “reactivate my ass-ets”.
It is after all only a toy. A thing to zap aliens from Zog on but we as Americans take it far too seriously, even putting our most valuable and trusted information on it. My trust in these things is about at it’s end. It is a money making, self perpetuating deal of meaningless “upgrades” simply to enhance profit margins.
I could of course farm all of this out to our people deficient,unknowledgeable outsourced IT department but when I did that in the past a premier high visibilty project was two months behind schedule. They supplied me with a PC with the newer half size PC expansion cards and when my programming mistake surfaced an easy solution presented itself. I had a fully size workable PC card in my hand I could not use. The purchasing process takes weeks.
The Satan inspired business practices of Microsoft became the IT industry standard, leading to the decline of “western civilization” in the early 21st century.
Just another day in the life of an engineer.