Re: OT: Query on mirroring for Paul Breeze et al.

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Patricia M Godfrey wrote:

> Harry will no doubt accuse me of paranoia, but surely the reason you
> cannot "rapidly restore your OS and installed app.s" is MicroSquelch's
> terror that someone might clone the system and run it on several
> machines? I'll bet Very Big Companies with multimillion $$ site licenses
> get tools that we poor slobs don't.
>

Patricia,

I expect this must be true, at least in substantial measure. And surely
*not* confined to site license situations that run into the million $ range,
either. I'm aware of some license situations that run from the high hundreds
to the lower 1000's (of seats), in which the IT Dept. was given No Serial #
install CDs for W2K, or No Serial # / No Activation Required install CDs for
XP Pro, suitable for mass rollout to however many workstations were
involved. In the latter case, that means you can install again & again,
change hardware at will etc., without the usual need to seek absolution from
Redmond. (I have even seen a few sealed, hologrammed, gen-u-wine copies of
the latter turn up at a local computer show, with an asking price of about
$130. Even thought about buying one, but I think I'd rather put the money
into SVISTA, and have quite a bit of change left over.) I also know that IT
Dept.s have ways of incorporating fixes and Service Packs into *modified*
install CDs. (Of course, they are always going to be playing catch-up, what
with the steady stream of freshly discovered trap doors and security holes,
that turn up regularly on the Windows Update site.) And I would be very
surprised if that was the full extent of it. They probably have things like
all-in-one ISO images on DVD or server, that can be shot out en masse to an
armada of machines on the network, so that you don't have to be shuttling a
CD set all over the place. In a major business situation, efficiency is
important.


Jordan