Windows 8 & 8.1

Gdetrailer wrote:
Most good size companies actually screen all updates before applying them to the company PCs.

That may be true, but I know of a case or two where an upgrade was rolled out to the main frame and.... Well. let's say it needed more time in the lab. One of those was THE TELEPHONE COMPANY, yes AT&T.

Oops.

burlmart wrote:
Fascinating, but way more hard/firm'software than I know. Beyond programming languages, I was clueless.

We actually use the Pxe boot to Ghost image our PCs before they go to customers. Images are created by our Software team then handed off to our Production team which loads the PCs.

Makes for quick loading of our customized applications.

Something else to toss out there to all the sky is falling folks.

Most good size companies actually screen all updates before applying them to the company PCs.

Basically like in my company, our IT department has their own INTERNAL Windows Update server, the IT PCs are fire walled from MS update server and registry has been altered to point only to the INTERNAL IT department Update server.

IT has a team of folks who review and test the updates on a test system. Once update is determined to not cause problems with our systems AND it is determined to be a CRITICAL NEEDED update then the update is loaded to the IT Update server. IT PCs then will discover the update and install in the background.

NOT ALL released Updates are needed or critical.

At the same time our Customer Software team DOES THE SAME THING for our customers PCs. However instead of weekly releases the updates are released QUARTERLY (EVERY THREE MONTHS).

The reason for this is every so often an Update can or will cause serious BAD side effects which can cause our software to quit working or cause a critical fault (basically you can say folks lives are at stake on this).

Our software team takes the updates and does complete and full systems testing, running through all aspects of the software.

We don't just blindly accept all updates, no they must be put to the test before being put out on our systems. Thorough testing takes time so hence the quarterly release schedule.

Fascinating, but way more hard/firm'software than I know. Beyond programming languages, I was clueless.

burlmart wrote:

Gdetrailer wrote:

burlmart wrote:
Gdetrailer

I often wonder if the IBM mainframe computer/minicomputer with dozens of dum terminals for enterprise didn;t make more sense than PC upgrades to 'personalized' OSs every 5 years.

The 'personalized' desire could have remained in the court of Atari and Commodore.

Actually there are many businesses today running what we used to call Dumb Terminals.

They call them "Win Terminals" or "Win Terms", aka "diskless boot workstations".

These are nothing more than a PC terminal (no internal HD, optical drive and many do not have USB running a virtual Windows PC disk image from a server farm (sort of like a "main frame" but running Windows Network server environments instead). The IT group manages all aspects of the Win Term environment down to screen resolutions and such.

Interesting.

Does MS charge sa,e for a win term as for a complete PC?

Not sure on the licensing but I would have to say that the manufacturer of the Win Term may have purchased a Embedded Windows license or it may be up to the IT dept of the company using them to manage the licensing. I never really got into that aspect of the PC world, just aware that they do exist and are being used.

With that said, any PC starting with the P4 BIOS actually HAS that capability built in. Basically with P4 BIOS there is a diskless boot sector built into the BIOS. Many PCs it is hidden so you don't see it on boot up but it is what is called Pxe (pixy) boot.

Set up a Pxe boot server on a network, create a PC "image" for the remote PC to boot into and set the PC BIOS to find the Pxe boot server.

Once found then the system board then executes the boot image... Once image has loaded it looks like any PC running Windows.. Still have to have a license for each workstation though since you would be booting to Windows OS.

Gdetrailer wrote:

burlmart wrote:
Gdetrailer

I often wonder if the IBM mainframe computer/minicomputer with dozens of dum terminals for enterprise didn;t make more sense than PC upgrades to 'personalized' OSs every 5 years.

The 'personalized' desire could have remained in the court of Atari and Commodore.

Actually there are many businesses today running what we used to call Dumb Terminals.

They call them "Win Terminals" or "Win Terms", aka "diskless boot workstations".

These are nothing more than a PC terminal (no internal HD, optical drive and many do not have USB running a virtual Windows PC disk image from a server farm (sort of like a "main frame" but running Windows Network server environments instead). The IT group manages all aspects of the Win Term environment down to screen resolutions and such.

Interesting.

Does MS charge sa,e for a win term as for a complete PC?

burlmart wrote:
Gdetrailer

I often wonder if the IBM mainframe computer/minicomputer with dozens of dum terminals for enterprise didn;t make more sense than PC upgrades to 'personalized' OSs every 5 years.

The 'personalized' desire could have remained in the court of Atari and Commodore.

Actually there are many businesses today running what we used to call Dumb Terminals.

They call them "Win Terminals" or "Win Terms", aka "diskless boot workstations".

These are nothing more than a PC terminal (no internal HD, optical drive and many do not have USB running a virtual Windows PC disk image from a server farm (sort of like a "main frame" but running Windows Network server environments instead). The IT group manages all aspects of the Win Term environment down to screen resolutions and such.

mockturtle wrote:
If you think that installing Windows 8.1 will resolve the issues you may have had with 8, think again. I'm not asking for advice here--I know that there are fixes for some of the devious features of this nightmare OS. Next laptop I buy will be a Mac.

I laughed when reading this.

I am/was a devoted Microsoft guy…. In some ways still am. I've worked on literally hundreds of PC’s for friends, family, and mostly business.

I am typing this reply using a virtual machine running Windows 7 on my MacBook Air with Mac OS X. I also have two more virtual machines with Win XP installed, both with legacy programs, one for personal use and one for business use, and one VM with Windows 8. Win8 really only gets used to troubleshoot other peoples Windows 8 problems.

MS Windows 8 pushed me to the dark side (Apple) and I've got to say… it’s not bad over here.

Gdetrailer

I often wonder if the IBM mainframe computer/minicomputer with dozens of dum terminals for enterprise didn;t make more sense than PC upgrades to 'personalized' OSs every 5 years.

The 'personalized' desire could have remained in the court of Atari and Commodore.

burlmart wrote:

CKNSLS wrote:

burlmart wrote:
Just a note

Going out of your way to grab W7 currently means you have only 6 more years of MS security patches.

Now they may bend after this W8 rollout's reputation and as yet unknown impact, but just sayin'

If the Enterprise (business/companies) systems continue to "pan" Windows 8-they (MicroSoft) will keep it a feasible system!

Not just sure of your lingo. but I suspect W7 will get an extension like XP had

The word "PAN" can be replaced with "IGNORE", most companies are ignoring W8.

They will simply stay put on what they are using until MS releases the NEXT MAJOR OS ABOVE 8.1

This is nothing new and has happened many times with past OS releases.

schedule of support

explanatory story

both from laptop running slow thread below this thread.