How "degunking" extends PC lifecycles at Bank of NY

Fragging and

Fragging and defragging-
Fixing gunked up "community" pc's are always a source of pain for me. Users with half-baked ideas are worse than folks that just leave everything alone.
Someone finds a freeware "cleanup" utility like ccleaner or cleanup then runs it and says
"Wow, 2 gig more space just got freed up".
Sure they cleaned things up, but they also helped to make it really fragmented.
1. Defragging can help IF people don't play with taskmanager and "kill" off the porcess.
No one can seem to leave it running, as their playtime is SO very important.
2. Defrag utilities really vary in strength and quality.
IMHO, from average to best are:
-builtin XP -better than nothing
-norton
-diskkeeper
-perfectdisk
-O&O Defrag - best
*Note: last 2 can defrag locked system files and swap files during startup, after you reboot and before system files get locked. Makes a big difference.

*Note2: had a 300mhz celery pc, win98se, defragged twice a week. Still took 5 minutes + to shutdown.
After Perfectdisk throughly cleaned things, for the first time in years, I could shutdown in about 10 - 15 seconds.

*Note3: I give O&O the top billing as it defrags in like 5 different ways, you get to chose based on pc's usage.

Just my 02 cents.

Won't it be great in 3 to 4

Won't it be great in 3 to 4 year's time when you won't need an OS, just a web browser to run simple software applications. That's when hoods like Microsoft who thrive on closed systems and closed standards to keep their competitive edge will no longer be able to compete. Lovely.

I am what some may consider

I am what some may consider an IT "Old Timer"! For all of the bad things that may be said about Bill Gates, and the merry men (people) of Redmond one fact still remains; their efforts (Good or Bad) took computing out of the hands of the Corporate MIS divisions, and tech savvy, and delivered it to the common man (people). Even the tech savvy eventually embraced Win95 and Office as the standard. Can you say WYSIWYG?

Robert's Degunking program is a sound business practice. Nougat's suggestion to "Lock Down" systems is one option, but doing so can prevent the "troops" from effectively responding to their customer's immediate needs. Front line employees should have the ability to develop customized solutions "On the Fly", instead of having wait for the lengthy enhancement review committee process, and “Next Quarterly Release” of the standard Company Applications. PC deployment in the workplace enabled front line employees to deliver the level of customer service that the corporate board of directors was demanding.

Implementing a periodic "Equipment Refresh" program is an excellent method for IT organizations to get a bigger bang for their Hardware buck. As an added bonus, this program also provides a means of getting better feedback on what/how tools are being used by front line employees.

What's gunking up a lot of

What's gunking up a lot of corporate computers is fragmentation -in Win95/98, any user could and did defrag their own system. In Win2K and XP Pro, you can only defrag if you've got Admin rights, and most users are restricted from that, so the performance degrades until a tech with admin rights logs on and cleans up - which can't happen often enough. If Microsoft let Defrag run with ordinary user rights, a lot of the performance problems wouldn't have happened - better yet, make defragging a normal background process! Netware servers never needed defragging, because their OS used 'elevator seeking' - so fragmentation wasn't an issue. Too bad Microsoft brought fragmentation to servers - it was never an issue with Netware!

The root of the problem is

The root of the problem is hardly putting new software on a computer, that is the purpose of disk drives. It's the inability of the OS to do IT'S job correctly.
I am surprised widows has ever got as far as it has. Gill Bates did a poor copy of CP/M (a decent OS in it's day) then tried to plagiarize Mac OS and set the computer age back beyond the Analytic Engine. Why microsh*t couldn't stick at things they COULD do, BASIC, Pascal, Assemblers, compilers and interpretors and the occassional office product, is beyond my understanding.

Of course, when you reimage

Of course, when you reimage a computer, it's going to run exactly the way it did when the image was created. This is a no-brainer.

Applying security such that users are not able to gunk the computers up in the first place goes more to the root cause than trying to fix the symptoms after they occur.