Refreshing? - try Sinking...
Working for small struggling webdev agency means there's never a "plan" to upgrade hardware, it's more a case of who shouts loudest and moans the most.
The accounts dept. just soldier on with old beige boxes - our customer base are all totally clueless for the most part, so there's no impact.
In the studio, however, we seem to exist in a never ending cycle of hardware related unhappiness. Even one of the Mac users - traditionally easy to please - is pissed off because they've got one of the grotty 21" iMacs with it's "home user" quality monitor. You know the ones - where a solid colour looks like a gradient.
The resident socially inept hypocondriac coke-bottle-glasses wearing, caffine swilling, "If I didn't program it, it's rubbish", Linux t-shirt wearing, rude and untrustworthy programming twat doesn't count, because he's a Marter and a smart-arse nobody likes.
"I can run cutting edge debian testing on this old abacus in the corner"
"Linux is brilliant because we can keep our old hardware running until it catches fire"
What he doesn't realise is that the boss remembers this, so when it comes to deciding which lucky person gets an upgrade, he gets ignored. (can you tell I think he's a dickhead?)
After two years of constant bargaining, I finally got a rig with about half the power of my home file server. It has a Dell badge on it. It *had* Vista on it. It's a PC fit for a nail-varnish applying, facebook obsessed, talks-non-stop receptionist.
I struggle to run XP pro.
Virtual machine? Pah, try Virtual standstill !
So...
What are we doing about refreshing the PC estate?
Fuck all.
Right now, we're all wondering if were going to have jobs in the next 6 months, hardware is the least of our problems.