Rodent Regatta

Philip Greenspun is seeing technology from the perspective of one who just spent time defragging drives. Trust me. There are few people who do this. We often find business PC’s in disastrous shape because of the bit rot so common in Windows PC’s that have a few miles on them. We need a Moore’s Law of ease of use!

Yesterday, I lost nearly an entire day. I took a laptop to a client’s office and attempted to join it to their Windows NT 4.0 domain without losing that PC’s ability to join the domain to which it was normally attached. As of this moment, that laptop can’t join either domain. No email is available for it, and none of the files stored locally are accessible.

It now has nine or ten user profiles on it with a complete set of documents and settings folders for each. This is all as a result of trying to use that laptop on the client’s network to do a project. DNS, DHCP settings, IP addresses, gateways, user names, passwords, domain names… There has to be a better way!