Wow, the beauty of a T-1 line. I just received 7 Dell Optiplex machines with XP Pro. I downloaded the XP security fixes in about 10 seconds and Acrobat Reader 5.0 (about 8 MB) in just a few seconds. Did this 7 times.
XP was (is) new to me and I was VERY frustrated with it. Because of all the animation and crap these 1.8 GH machines seemed hardly faster than the P2-333s they are replacing, at least in terms of moving around in windows. Some operations cause the machiine to "go to sleep" for several seconds when it shouldn't be doing anything.
It was mainly the excessive security on the XP that gave me the most trouble. Setting them up to hook up to our 2K domain was a problem at first. I was very confused about security in the domain vs security on the XP machine. I wasted a whole day figuring this out and had to pay Dell $180 for help from their "Enterprise" division. The problem was, I would set up a user that could log into the domain but didn't have administrative rights on the XP machine. Once, I couldn't access user setup because I wasn't the administrator when I CLEARLY WAS the administrator. I muddled around and finally fixed that problem.
By the way, I found that you can clone and XP machine using Norton Ghost, with no activation code, but I couldn't figure out how to reinstate the clone to its own XP activation, and when I tried joining the domain it wouldn't work until I gave up, reinstalled XP (very easy by the way) and set it and the other 6 up from scratch.
The CD burners worked just fine - the drive is a combo CD/CD writer/DVD reader drive. Seems a little slow as a CD but did a great job burning CDs. I made an image of a machine - about 3GB - in 30 minutes, and it restored to the other machine in about 20 mintures.
Right now the problem is that it takes about 2 minutes to log into the domain!! This is a 10-node network with one fileserver (domain controller). I don't see how this could take so long. The old slow Win 98 machines logged in immediately, so I guess this is "progress".
Once windows is up and we are using the real applications such as tax preparation and other stuff the machines work very fast and easy with XP. And no lockups, blue screens or other problems so far.
We also got some Dell 17" LCD monitors and they are AWESOME. You get the whole 17" on these babies, not the 15" or so you get with a regular 17" CRT.
This makes probably 35 Dell computers I've bought in 3 years. I have never had any problem with their equipment out of the box, very little problems through the years at all.
As for XP, the jury is out. The security to me seems to be way overkill for the average user, even the average business user. It doesn't seem right to have to be a server expert just to get a workstation up and running as a client.
The reason I bought these faster machines is to run full time virus protection software. I loaded Norton Antivirus and find that with real-time scanning I am disappointed in how much speed the AV software robs. I will still disable it and use nightly scans and realtime email scans only, plus the firewall.
On the network, to look up Peachtree companies - about 100 of them, with AV software it takes 30 seconds for the list to come up. Without AV software it takes about 8 seconds. This is typical of the performance hit the AV makes, when the network is involved.
