*rant*how to cripple a computer?
- Thread starter k3v
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Your whining about having a Pentium 4? All the machines in out 6th form are P4's - just run some maintenance apps on it. Ashampoo Magical Defrag is beautiful for my vista rig. Seriously I cant believe anyone is complaining about having to use a Pentium 4 lol
Your missing the point, If i was only running office apps then I wouldnt complain but im not. You should see the spec of machines that the company that produce the software recommend.
read the first post you twit. he's not running word 2003, he's running a 3d CAD program, which requires a lot of grunt from both the CPU and GFX
What software is it? Deliberately killing a working machine is a bit immoral imo. Public schools would kill for that machine I'm sure!
To put things in perspective, I use a package called strucad, it costs around £10000 to buy then around £1000 a year for a maintenance agreement which iirc you need to get software updates.
I was asking for opinions on breaking it, i never said I would do it
Don
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We used to use Cads Advance Steel to do that job, plus it plugged into AutoCad easily enough.
Whats the reccomended spec for strucad?
Whats the reccomended spec for strucad?
What software is it? Deliberately killing a working machine is a bit immoral imo. Public schools would kill for that machine I'm sure!
State schools you mean! I'm sure public schools have much better computers than those.
Playing devils advocate, the person who downloaded and approved your mouse, probably got into trouble for it. Personally, I have no problem with users at our place using equipment they feel comfortable with eg keyboards, mice etc, but there is a strict policy that disallows use, so I am stuck between a rock and a hard place as I have to be seen to toe the company line. I "get around" this by using the health and safety reasoning, which gives me a bit of leeway, but from the users point of view, I am making a big thing about what they consider relatively minor.
I could find myself out of a job if I bought for example a HP pc instead of the strict spec Dell, although the policy for the UK arm of our business had an addition of "or equivalent spec" written in, which allows me to keep current with latest hardware for users providing it doesn't significantly deviate from standard.
As for your outlook problem, its not something that would stop you working, so thats why it has been given a low priority, but it should still have been fixed.
The trouble with being in the IT department is that users don't see what goes on behind the scenes and can't appreciate that their 5 minute job might get put on the back burner in preference to a failed router or broken server, conversely, IT people are guilty of cherry picking the best or "sexy" projects and jobs. I mean what appeals more to an IT person, rescuing the company from a network outage or reinstalling outlook on a users machine? I know I'm guilty of it, but I don't have a choice seeing as I am the IT department.
It sounds to me like you need to approach this in terms that people can understand from the techie side of things for the IT bods, to the financial side of things for the management bods. Get a technical spec for the software and then put it side by side with the spec of the computer you have now. Write a report stating that the business is loosing money due to the lack of productivity. If you openly moan about how slow and rubbish it is, the IT bods for some reason take this very personally and will likely ignore you.
However, if you put it into plain "I need this spec because the software demands it and because its costing the business money due to my lost hours of productivity" terms, then both management and IT will understand. If you put it into "this computer is rubbish, it doesn't work and is slow" you will likely be labelled as a whinger. People like that get one of my 'special' computers
HTH
Id never heard of Cads Advance Steel until the other day, i used to use autocad so maybe I should look into to broaden my horizons
Basically the spec is top notch cpu, a quaddro graphics card and scsi drives
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brilliant. Seriously though, document the amount of work you get done in the week and compare it to your contemporaries on here with better rigs. Businesses don't like to lose money end of, so if a small one time investment will get their well trained monkeys efficient again they'll do it. Take me for example, part time at a well known diy store, and I managed to get one of the workstations upgraded from a ****** dell celeron to a nice new ibm machine And i only work 9.5 hours a week! If I give you a view from the IT department side of things, it helps you better in the long run.
Im in full agreement with you in fact and if that was at my place, I would have gone to management or at the very least written an e-mail requesting they spend some capex on you.
P4 is great compared to what some people have been using where I'm based at the moment. We're doing an upgrade project for 400 of their desktops and some of the people have been using Paintshop XI on old Dell 866mhz PCs with 256mb of RAM!! God knows how they've been working lol 
its definitely making my job more difficult, but I don't want to go down that road, I don't think i'd be popular. I can see it from the company point of view as in as soon as people hear I've got a new computer, the will claim theirs is slow too. I told my boss this and that i'm quite happy to buy one or for them to stop it fRom my wages but they just said that doesn't look good for the company, I'm stuck, lol.
anyway thanks for letting me get it all off my chest, ill just sit back, and take the overtime...