Re: a looming disaster
Thank you, psychonaut. As one of your potentialo customers in paradigm, here's a solution I'm using for my 19 Windows machines:
Linux online, Windows offline.
As the provider, you can adopt this idea by creating customized Linux external drive installations and then tell your clients to plug them in whenever going online.
I used Mint 17.1 (.2 is buggy), PCLinuxOS, Fedora 22, as the latest three; these I installed on 60 GB old external drives and some sticks (Kingston 3.0 being much faster, sizes from 32 GB to 128GB). These installations I customized and then plugged them into each of my machines, booted, which saved the settings for cards and peripherals, one machine after the next. So now, when I plug in, booting is much faster, as the 'library' of the different machine settings, is stored somewhere in the Linux bootloader (which I think is named 'grub' or whatever).
Then I just use Firefox and Thunderbird as usual, since those programs are already configured in my Windows machines. So now I can take all my Win7 machines off Windows update, and my XP machines are already EOL and off it. So now all those machines have new life.
So now for you the computer service provider, this makes for a happier relationship at your end, more money, and happiness at your clients' end. At least, I hope so.
If everyone had just one customized Linux stick to plug in when surfing, all this MSFT bullying would be bypassed, and MAYBE then MSFT will wake up and smell the coffee.
Thank you for your time.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
