Fiddling with corporate policies

Things are getting moronic now. IT has been instructed, and they were very strident in saying it wasn't their idea, to change the background picture and screensavers of all PCs at corporate with approved images.

What possible benefit could this have for anyone?

Not content with that, too, they're also messing with the setting and configuration of Word, Excel and other software. So we ahve to set it back to where it was. Things like having to set all the quick icons back in the toolbar.

What possible benefit could this have for anyone?

Seriously, it seems that the purpose of all these idiot policies are hust to interfere with our work. Next, I suppose, they'll upgrade us all to WIndows 8a nd bring everything to a standstill.

It's done. Adn apaprently it can't be undone.

I actually cleverly fooled IT by switching my main user account to backup, and naming the backup account as the main one. So they messed up the wrong account :D So as far as usability of the interface goes, I'm fine. But the PC has slowed to a crawl whenever I want to open a PDF, and at assorted other times. Not to mention the department's file server tends to freeze now and then.

Maybe I should begin pushing my coworkers to push the boss to push his boss to push IT to upgrade our PCs.

After 9 and half years of faithful, exemplary service, my work PC has given up the hard drive and gone to the big recycling bin elsewhere in the city.

To be sure the last nine months or so it was hell to use. It was slow, taking up to two minutes to open a 5 kb file. It would seize up when looking for Windows updates, or when the Norton decided it was time for a real-time scan (non-user configurable due to company policy), whereupon it took me between 10 and 20 minutes to turn it off and back on (unless I was in a hurry, in which case I shut it down manually). But that was due to the changed made (long story) in order to make all corporate PCs useless (longer story and paranoid rant).

I'll miss it as much as someone can miss a PC (not much). I don't think I ever used any other machine that long.

I got an HP with Win7 temporarily, so IT says, until they can get me a new one. I amde it clear if they tried to foist a Win8 PC on me, they will live to regret it.

Go back to the start of this thread.

We disbaled the idiotic, taime-wasting printer thing.

Today IT showed up to "implement" it again <sigh>

I litreally ran them off. I showed them a stack of 700 (give or take) pages, each printed separately, which constitute an open market study (one of the few things I do here which is not a total waste fo time). See, I go online and look up prices of various products in grocery stores, then print an image of each web page.

With a minimum of two stores and an average of 280 products, that's a lot of printing. This naturally takes me hours to do. Now imagine if I had to get up and enter my PIN to the pritner each time I wanted to print! I'd take at least double the time. Oh, ideally you can hold several printouts in the queue, then issue one PIN command to print. But every glitch, bug, undocumented feature, power outage, power variance, accidental printer turn-off, printer memory overflow, etc will mean additional huors of work re-printing tons of pages.

Seriously. What the hell are they using instead of brains to do their thinking?

Ah, I got the Win7 work PC configured just how I want it.

Well, almost. We save all our work in a file server. I can open it with a click, but if I'm doing a new file I can't save it as easily.

Quote: Nareed

After 9 and half years of faithful, exemplary service, my work PC has given up the hard drive and gone to the big recycling bin elsewhere in the city.

Was your old machine running Windows XP? Windows Vista was released 7.5 year ago.

If it hasn't been trashed, some of the old Windows XP can be outfitted with Puppy Linux
http://puppylinux.org/main/Download%20Latest%20Release.htm

You can use them to surf the internet or to operate
http://www.libreoffice.org/

Spare hard drives can be purchased for $20 (80 gigabytes or less), but frequently when the old hard drive is reformatted it has some life.

Quote: Pacomartin

Was your old machine running Windows XP?

I failed to say, dind't I? Yes, it ran XP (recently "updated" to XP Pro, which went about 50% of the way in slowing it down).

Quote:

Windows Vista was released 7.5 year ago.

And trashed 7.5 years and two seconds ago. If only I'd been paying attentiopn then <sigh>

Quote:

If it hasn't been trashed, some of the old Windows XP can be outfitted with Puppy Linux

No idea. It's not my call.

But I do still own a crappy, generic XP currently taking up space in my room. I was going to give it away. I think I'll bring it to the office and see if anyone wants it. I couldn't in good conscience sell it, as it has plenty of issues.

I also have my old Vista PC at home. As soon as I get around to moving some more files, I'll probably reformat the HD and use it to test Linux. If that fails, I've an OEM CD for XP I can install in it. Who knows, it might even run well for once. I couldn't in good conscience sell it, as it is Windows Vista.