I'm depressed.

I just had to give up my Vista machine. I actually liked the damn thing, too.

4 1/2 years ago, we replaced all 120+ desktops (that was a weekend of hell I never want to go through again) in the building, replaced the Compaq D300 minitowers (XP) with Dell Optiplex 760 towers (Vista). Overall, once moving all the hardware was done, and reconfiguring about half of our users for dual screens, it wasn't that big of an adjustment. And since we got Vista boxes with plenty of RAM, it's been, overall, pretty smooth.

That was then.

We're overdue for another hardware refresh, now pushed back to the 1Q 2014 due to budget issues. So, the IT group has been evaluating Del Optiplex 7010 machines. Damn, they're tiny. (And actually come with a real COM port too, unlike so many machines with plenty of USB ports but no old fashioned serial COM ports). Unfortunately, the only way to get them is with Windoze 8.

What a major pain in the tuchus. Oh, I can get used to it, but I know our user base. They will NOT be happy campers when this gets rolled out.

I've been putting off this last pain... but we ran out of machines to assign to new staff. So one by one, the IT group's 760's have been re-purposed, and our test machines became our working machines. Today was my turn.

... no, we can't drop to Win7. We don't have the licenses, Dell can't or won't sell us the downgrade licenses (and then there are the driver issues as well). I would have loved to upgrade the 760's to Win 7, if we could have gotten the licenses (yeah, I know, we should of when we had the chance... which I recommended, but was turned down), but too late.

Win 8 wouldn't be bad on a touch screen. But who has a touch screen monitor on their desktop (today)?