2 new systems in a week...
 

I must be having a lucky week - I just got a new dual-core AMD 5200 box at home with a 20" Dell flat panel (to replace a 5-year old P4 1.8) on Friday, and yesterday afternoon, our IT guy came and swapped my 3-year old Thinkpad and 6-year old 15" CRT for a new Dell laptop (Latitude D620), 17" flat panel, and docking station.

Life seems to be much faster now - it no longer takes 8 minutes for the PC to boot, login, load Outlook '03, and have the system be responsive.

Interesting. I use a PIII system at work, and it only takes me about 4 minutes to do all that.

Yeah, I don't know what the deal is. I think our corporate config is just a pig. The machine was a 1.5 GHz P4, with 512MB RAM. One problem was that they seems to push patches and updates to us on a near-daily basis, and while that happened, the system would swap constantly.

There were some other network things involved too. When I pull the plug and boot up, I can be loaded and responsive in ~4-5 minutes as well.

It’s tedious, but reloading the OS will make for a faster machine depending on how much junk was allowed to be installed on it.

Trust me, if I could have nuked my corporate build and done a clean install, I would have. But, it would have been kind of hard to authenticate onto the network - if you plug in a non-corporate imaged device here, it won't even assign you an IP.

We have other "intelligent" policies on our systems here at work. Even if you have local admin rights on your box (which I do, due to some unique hardware I use in my job), you aren't allowed to execute a file called "setup.exe".

So, I just rename the file. :)