The Ubuntu Experiment

[Lorenzo Taylor]

        Add me (and over 2000 people here at my workplace) to the list
of folks 
who haven't seen a Win crash in a while.
        WinXP locking up/crashing here is not an issue. At all. It
happens, 
buut very infrequently

This is most likely due to the people who work behind the scenes to keep
it running. All computers in such an environment are backed up regularly
and reformatted with a clean installation of Windows probably every
month. No. It's not going to crash and your data won't be lost because a
regular backup and restore takes place during the reinstallation process
which usually takes place when the office is closed or otherwise empty
if it's open 24 hours. Most workplaces have this policy in effect. The
only variation is the time between reinstallations. They will let
Windows run anywhere from 3 months down to only about a week, yes I have
heard of reinstallation once a week, especially in a university
environment, before reinstalling and restoring the systems. And this was
in fact Windows XP Professional. They are able to restore things to the
point where the end user doesn't realize that it has been done. At the
university where I was told they reinstalled once a week, the only
reason I knew this had happened was because I had a program that needed
an authorization key that couldn't be restored from their backup and
there was a limited number of authorization keys available. I walked in
one day and couldn't figure out why my program didn't work properly.
This is when they told me that they reformat once a week. Since my
program was extremely important to me at the time, I was able to get
them to relax that policy for a single computer, but only on that single
computer and only because I couldn't work without my expensive screen
reading program. I'm sure they were glad to find out that I had bought a
laptop and installed Linux on it so I wouldn't have to worry about this
problem from that point on. They were more than happy to allow me to
connect my Linux laptop to their network because they could go back to
reformatting all their computers once a week and they were apparently
not afraid of my Linux laptop introducing viruses onto their network.

Live long and prosper,
Lorenzo
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