On Fri, Jun 30, 2017 at 09:40:30AM +0100, Gary Stainburn wrote:
However, I still have a number of WinXP machines running – through
necessity.
I'm so sorry for you. I've gotten rid of all of them at my clients,
through a mixture of software/hardware upgrades, or in the absolute worst
cases running them as VMs on host systems so I can monitor and restrict any
external connections.
As for wiping Windows boxes on a regular basis, I would be surprised
if 10% of people did this.
Concur; I regularly have client workstations that run for 5-7 years from
the day we put them in service without ever reloading the OS--be it
Windows, OS X, or Linux. Of course, I take care of them...
There is no way that I would be able to resource such a project.
There is, but typically not for any office with fewer than, say, 100
workstations and with non-standard hardware platforms. If you've the
luxury of using standardized hardware platforms, and enough installations
to make it worthwhile, you can create image libraries for deployment. But
because of the management/administrative overhead of creating, inventorying
and updating stored images, it's just not worth the trouble for most SMBs.
Having to wipe and reinstall because Windows is stuffed again
happens far too often in my opinion.
Eh. Not so much since Win7, provided the machine is properly managed--and
that means stomping on users who never meet a download they didn't like,
don't play in our (admin) sandbox, etc.
Cheers,
--
Dave Ihnat
dihnat(a)dminet.com