Company I.T.

After spending 4 years at university (1998 - 2000), I was fully knowledgable about Microsoft NT4.

I now work for a major national company (I don't want to say which one) with over 5000 employees. We have offices in nearly every major city in the UK. The whole company is Networked.

When I started with the company in the year 2000. Guess what the networked O.S was in 2000.... Windows 3.1 with Micromail.... Talk about taking a step backwards. I had never seen Windows 3.1.

Anyway in early 2001, the company unpgraded the network to NT4.

For the last two years, I have been subconded by the company to another compnay. The last 2 years have been bliss, using Windows 2000 as the main O.S, with alot of admin rights.

Now however, I am back in another office , and guess what, the comnpany still has NT4 as the main networked OS. Talk about taking another step backwards.

Some things I will miss now that I am back with NT4 are; No USB connectivity, No quick launch tool bar (especially show desktop), CPUs that cannot be fully utilised, limited RAM.

Anyway, besides the rant, my questions are:

Do all companys have lousy I.T.? Whats you esperience? Is Windows XP / 2000 just a dream?

How can USB work with NT4? ----> I really need to put pictures from the digital camera onto my desktop NT4 machine. Other than taking it home and burning a CD, can it be done?

Cheers


PjC

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Originally Posted by starside

Do all companys have lousy I.T.? Whats you esperience? Is Windows XP / 2000 just a dream?

How can USB work with NT4?

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Dunno about other places as this is my first job in IT and so far its been good, my main worries are the users not the software letting me down.

I work for a large school (800+ Computers) within a university and there are no machines running anything except XP/2000 (a few 200-400MHz Win98 Machines running lab instruments but they dont really count)

Sounds like your company is just amazingly skimpy with their IT Budget and/or have one helluva an incompitent IT manager.

USB & NT4? No. Simple as that.

I'm currently working on a project for BP and their servers are mainly 2003, they've upgraded already, Exchange is being upgraded (and patched) right now.
A few months ago I worked on a project for Barclays and they were starting migrating their servers to 2003 back in July, so most of them should be done by now.

Personally I was suprised that such large organisations have switched over so quickly when the software is quite new and relatively untested in real world environments.

Apart from that, virtually all the other organisations I've worked for in the last couple of years all ran server 2000 or were in the process of changing to it. I think whoever you work for is rather slow/cheap.

If you didn't guess I'm an IT contractor ;)

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4 years at university (1998 - 2000)

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wow...thats hardcore :p

I know what you mean, but still there is the saying "If it aint broke, dont fix it"...so if it works satisfactoraly (not great, but ok), then why go to the MAJOR hassle of changing over and risking a major screw up?

The company i work for has around 200 computers over 3 different buildings all on server 2000 and all linked via a magina (VPN). We did upgrade to 2003 but it was having problems with the VPN which we tried resolving for days but no joy so we are back on 2000 now.

Yeah, sounds like your company have pretty poor IT infrastructure management. NT is due to go out of support at the end of 2004 unless your company pays for a hefty custom support package and so it's pretty irresponsible to still have it deployed across the company at this stage.

A lot of software that works on 2000/XP will also run on NT4 but I'm not sure how much is still tested on it (we certainly don't test any of our software on NT4).

I guess your IT dept may also be having problems persuading the management why it's worth spending so much money on upgrading if everything currently works ok.

My company moved all desktops from Windows 2000 to XP Pro early this year and all the servers we now deploy are 2003.

cheers,
dave