[plug] Bill's enhanced standards (Re: [plug] Massive DoS attack?)

[Craig Ringer]

> Umm yes. Software changes are kool... But consider this:
> - The BIOS is password protected, so I can't find out what 
> its settings are and I can't change them.

Wow, that's offensive. My response to getting a PC with that particular 
setting would be to take it back and say "its broken, sorry - I can't do 
what I need to do with it and it isn't functioning as a PC"... or short 
the CMOS clear jumper.

> - I don't want to entirely get rid of WinXP - other ppl 
> still want to use it. There's too much stuff (in a 
> disorganised fashion) on the HDD right now for me to be 
> able to re-partition.

... and of course there's no easy way to resize NTFS volumes ... is 
there? Actually I thought that "Disk Manager" could do it but I could 
easily be mistaken, as I have only win2k on my laptop ( booted < 
1/month, normally Debian) and NT4 at work which is too fragile to touch 
without a good reason.

> Lesson: Buy a barebones system and build ur own custom PC - 
> Warranties are kinda crap.

Warranties are good for only one thing - hardware failures. Even then 
they have their downsides - most OEMs now ship a "system recovery" CD 
that when inserted into the PC during boot re-images the disk with a 
nice, clean windows install... and none of the users's files. This has 
happened to a couple of people here at work, one with an IBM and one 
with an HP machine. In neither case did the support person tell them 
that the CD would do this, and the cd began the image automatically 
without even an "are you sure?". I was stunned - am stunned - that this 
is allowed.

A friend of mine bought an HP a few years ago too, and it used to crash 
_very_ regularly, but only under noticeable loads so it wouldn't crash 
just after a clean install. HP refused to acknowledge that there was a 
problem, because "it works with the software it was shipped with (HP's 
version of win98) and we don't support 3rd party software". Hmm... a 
computer that doesn't do anything - really useful. Yeah, warranties are 
crap.

OTOH I can attest that for a group of machines > 4 or 5, you _do_ _not_ 
want to custom-build. I had to unfortunately and it is very far from fun 
maintaining them... as I told the boss it would be. *sigh*.

-- 
Craig Ringer
GPG Key Fingerprint: AF1C ABFE 7E64 E9C8 FC27  C16E D3CE CDC0 0E93 380D
	-- if it ain't broke, add features 'till it is. (or:)
	while (! broken) { features ++ ; broken = isBroken(features) }