Re: Graphics Cards
Another trip down memory lane on the subject of Hardware Replacement Programs at the same place as my earlier tale.
User puts in a request for a machine in a building due to be closed down, (its already devoid of staff) to be moved to his desk. Licences etc transferred from his old one to the new & he's king of the hill crowing over his "new" PIII 400 to all & sundry.
That lasted about 3 weeks when I replaced all the other machines in his department with PIV HP Vectra's (VL420 blue/cream case), wheres mine? Your current machine is not in scope for replacement at this time. My old one was? Yes. So you can replace this one with a new one & take this one away. Sorry your current machine is in scope for use, the old machine was decommissioned & the machine that would have replaced it re-allocated to another machine as we only got 90% of the machines we would need, as there would be some that we could just decommission through natural wastage.
Next year rolls around & I bring in his machine & once again he's back to crowing about being king of the hill with his new spec machine & how it's going to be so much better & faster than his coworkers.
Once again I bore the sad news to him that, spec wise they were the same (Different casing & more importantly motherboard) & it's not actually faster, that the image build for the ones deployed last year used the correct NT4 driver for the IDE controller, for his model they could only use a generic driver, adding into the mix that the ones from last year would image in 40 minutes & would reboot so fast that the IT staff would have to do it again to ensure we simply hadn't just logged out after a software install by mistake.
By comparison his new one took 1Hr 10 minutes to image & we were never in doubt that they had been restarted after a software install, as we watched the long slow Wiindows NT startup & crawl to the log in screen.
Another pint lamenting my trials & tribulations of the users in Building 225!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
