This Changed The Way I do Repairs....Must Read

[OfficeTechs]

50% off Paragon until the 15th

Code ZW8-2F1-FEA on checkout.

 

[Cornerstone Technologies]

I still think WinXp has much life in it xp does not 'NEED TO GO' as you state PCX. Since MS are going to support until 2014 Xp is still a valid O/S if users currently own the OEM for this. Hardware is another cost factor for some users as some do not need the newest fandangled hardware or O/s. This may or may not make it more difficult for you to support the client, though if you are knowledgable in the process Im sure you will find it easy enough.

Just because XP has another year or so of support from Microsoft, is no reason to not move clients in the direction of a modern OS. The fact is, that Microsoft will drop this OS like a bad date, leaving clients vulnerable to issues beyond having aging hardware and cost prohibitive replacements.

I remember just 2 years ago working for my last shop and still supporting Windows 98 installs. At that point, Win98 was 12 years old and not supported by anyone. The team and I had to present a plan to the owners to stop supporting these OSes without a fee for legacy support and to move these people onto Win7.

I take exception to the idea that because I am moving a client to a new OS that somehow I am not knowledgeable enough to support that obsolete OS. Quite the opposite, actually. I have a competitor here that actually went in front of a Chamber meeting and suggested that these companies keep plugging away at 15 year old machines because its cost effective for the business. What might be cost effective for the client, might actually be a disservice to them and be costing them dearly.

 

[Luis Rodriguez]

Will this work for me?

i have a customer who has a fairly complex server layout with several server drives and software located on different servers from different server drives. He asked me to upgrade his system, so i am building him a barebone system. My original plan was to sysprep the original machine, then clonezilla the old drive to the newer drive and put it into place so the new machine will be identical to his old one. Are you saying i could easily follow the instructions you provided, then once everything is up and running on the new system just clonezilla that image and it will be good to go? that seems like a much easier and painless route if its true. but you know what they say about things that are too good to be true.

 

[Simon Yates]

I think Macrium Reflect Deserves a mention here.

http://www.macrium.com/

 

[Simon Yates]

Regarding servers: What about converting physical legacy servers into VMWare ESXi VM's?

I worked on part of a team that had great success at a school where hardware was failing on more than one server.
Critical software and databases that the school could not function without had to remain available for both faculty and students.

We successfully converted an NT4, 2000, and three 2003 servers into VM's.
The in-house admin was blown away by how well it all went.
We did it over a long weekend and by the time school was back in it was as if nothing had changed.

This brought the school enough time to fully plan and properly migrate over to 2008 servers (which due to the succes of the VM's were built as VM's themselves).

Just some food for thought.