We spent this weekend in Cleveland ... working at my old church. We were replacing their ancient and pitiful Hewlett Packard running Windows NT server with a nice new Dell Poweredge running Windows 2003 Server. My current church, as well as my old church, are part of this cool church network that allows them to purchase Microsoft software at unbelievable prices. It's really great -- because without the huge discounts, most churches wouldn't be able to afford to have a nice network with some of the latest software on the market. Kudos to Microsoft for making it happen .... (although I'm sure there's something in it for them, even if I haven't figured out what yet). So, we were able to buy Windows 2003 Server for $120. Pretty good deal. The client licenses are about $6 a machine. Not bad!
We got to the office around 9:30 Saturday morning prepared to pretty smoothly move things over from the old server. But, as it always happens, things didn't go as planned. :censor:
Our pastor had recently received some money to buy a few new computers, and without consulting anyone who would know, bought 5 new machines ... with Windows XP Home on them. Anyone who knows anything about networking knows that you do NOT buy WinXP Home if you want to use those machines on a network domain. :yell: You can't join them to a domain. You can't use security policies or group policies or logon scripts .... or pretty much anything. You can hack and bash them a bit to be able to map network drives ... but what a nightmare. XP Home is the first operating system Microsoft has released that they purposefully removed all the networking capabilities. They had two or three machines running Windows 95/98 ... those were no problem. At least they can LOG ON to the network -- even if they aren't technically "joining" the domain. At least I can enforce some security policies, even if limited, on those older machines. But the XP Home machines can't log on to the network, because you can't join them to the domain. Spend the extra money on XP Pro. Thats why Microsoft did this -- they wanted to charge you more if you want to network a machine. Its an easy way for them to make a few extra bucks. Blah.
So, it ended up with Steve and I being there for about 11 hours sorting through all the various issues. :banghead:
Wow, that sucks. It's like the time I went home and my mom showed me the new digital camera she bought. From the home shopping channel. I so could have found her the best digital camera in her price range, but she didn't even do any research before she bought it. :banghead:
The last time I went home it kept shutting itself off when you pressed the button to take a picture.
Gotta love the parents. I now also have my grandparents to add to my computer "policing". Those helpdesk calls are always fun ...."well I clicked something, and then this thing got all big and then it just went away, so I clicked that other thing. What do you think happened?" :crazy:
But its still great that they're TRYING .... and my grampy is a champion solitaire player now. Not bad for an 87 year old :tongue:
I am so doomed when I finally get back to school. I'm hoping that if I major in CS, I won't have to necessarily worry about hooking all that crap up? Jesus. Doomed.
My grandma almost bought a fax machine from QVC. Luckily my uncle walked in while she was holding to order the thing and dissuaded her. She still can't explain what drove her to want a fax machine. Who would fax her? Weird. Those HSN and QVC hosts are strangely endearing to certain people.