@scottalanmiller said in Why Do People Still Text:

Nothing should ever make us feel that other people owe it to us to pay for phone plans for how we want to contact them, rather than how they want to be contacted.

I appreciate things are different in the US, but what about people who don't have internet with their plan, but do have (near) unlimited texting (this applies to members of my family). For those people, texting is the only way to communicate.

I'm not measured at all. And that's the way I like it

@scottalanmiller said in Paying to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10:

I think that you should just try and see what happens. It's very possible that it still works.

Yeah, I already wrote that it worked this morning.

I'm not relying on it, but I'm always going to try and use it before paying for it. I don't care whether it is free or not, but I'd take free over paid if given a choice.

I don't read a lot of press admittedly, but this is the only place where I've read that you can still upgrade to Windows 10 for free. I've read a few places talking about a workaround by claiming to need assistive technologies, but nowhere that says you don't need any workaround, you can just upgrade as normal. For free.

Even on this thread, loads of people posted, but you're the only one who posted that you could still upgrade for free.

I had a boss with a terrible memory. He genuinely didn't seem to remember what we agreed, so I had to get it all written down. Once we were in a meeting and he said "whose stupid idea was this?", to which I replied, "er..it was yours". To which he immediately said "Was it? Oh well, sounds like the kind of stupid idea I'd come up with".

It worked out ok for me, as I soon realised I could simply make things up and claim he'd previously agreed to them and he'd be none the wiser.

@Dashrender said in Paying to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10:

@Carnival-Boy said in Paying to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10:

I haven't. That would be awesome.

Here's my personal suggestion.

Get an SSD, grab one of those machines - remove the old drive, plug in the SSD, install Windows 10. try to activate it. If it works, Great!

Now format that SSD, remove it, put the old drive back in and wait for whatever software updates you need.

Now take that SSD to the second machine and repeat above process, rinse and repeat across all machines. Now that you have rights to use Windows 10 on all machines, get a VL for ONE Windows 10 Pro license and use the VL media to make an image that you use to deploy windows 10 on those machines.

This worked. Yay. How come this isn't more widely known?

@Dashrender said in How much notice to give an employer?:

@Carnival-Boy said in How much notice to give an employer?:

2 weeks? Blimey! That doesn't give the company much time to organise a replacement, does it? In the UK, at least a month is standard for salaried employees. In my last job I had to give 3 months notice.

Had to, as in it is the law? Or did you have an employment contract stating you had to give 3 months notice?

What if you just walked in and quit, could they somehow force you to work 3 months?

It was in my contract. If I'd have just walked they could have sued me, though in reality this rarely happens as it's not worth the time and effort for the employer (unless I went to a competitor). More likely I'd just get a bad reference.

2 weeks? Blimey! That doesn't give the company much time to organise a replacement, does it? In the UK, at least a month is standard for salaried employees. In my last job I had to give 3 months notice.

@Breffni-Potter said in Your Time Is Valuable:

This is the fallacy of businesses understanding how to use technical labour. They want to pay for the person to be giving 100% of their time and attention to task X. Even though task X has 0 business impact (Setting up a new server for example) so a lot of consultants do sit on their hands because the client wants a physical person in the room doing the job a lot of the time.

Sometimes the consultancy firms prefers to send their engineers on-site, even if it's largely redundant these days. I'm guessing it's because they want to upsell services whilst they're there. Sometimes I prefer engineers on-site because I can learn a lot from them (like how to do it next time myself :)) Sometimes the engineers prefer to work on-site because it allows them to focus without getting hassled from their work colleagues, bosses or other clients (although they might get hassled by me asking them a million questions).

Sometimes consultants waste time because they're just badly organised and haven't prepared for the job properly or brought the proper kit. That's when I get annoyed.

But sometimes it's just good to be on-site, talking to the client, talking to the users and making sure everything goes smoothly and according to plan.

I've used the word sometimes a bit too much in this post.

The good thing about being an in-house IT department is that it's easy to multi-task, so there's less time (no time?) sitting around waiting for something to complete. I get frustrated when I'm paying a consultant $1000 a day to sit and watch something install or download. We can often be loads more productive doing it in-house simply because we're doing several jobs at the same time.

For the record, I don't resent it, it's just frustrating for all concerned. No-one wants to sit around.

@DustinB3403 said in Paying to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10:

Now if that business initiative is from the IT department, shame on you. If it's from upper management saying "No, don't do an upgrade yet" then shame on them.

I'm not going there. I will say though that I did a tour of the Red Bull Formula 1 factory a few months ago. They're obviously on the bleeding edge of modern engineering, but I noted that even they had a few workstations still running XP.

I haven't. That would be awesome.

I think I'll go with Open Licence which is a fair bit cheaper than retail, at least. Dearer than OEM but Open licences are by far the easiest to manage during an audit.

It comes with a sticker? During our last audit we had to send copies of HP PC invoices to Microsoft, as I don't think Windows 10 includes a licence key / sticker any more?

Anyway, I'm not going down the OEM route. Firstly, I don't believe it's in the spirit of the licence. And secondly, I get enough hassle during a Microsoft audit as it is without adding any potential complications.

@DustinB3403 said in Paying to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10:

A really simple way to handle this would be to have a sub company purchase the equipment and key, build it out, and then sell the equipment for $.01 to the parent company.

You think that's really simple? We're not Enron.

@scottalanmiller said in Paying to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10:

That's been lifted or is so weird that it is totally ignored today.

From Microsoft.com:
If you are building a system for your personal use or installing an additional operating system in a virtual machine, you will need to purchase a full version of Windows 10, available in FPP. Windows 10, Windows 8.1, and Windows 7 system builder software does not permit personal use, and is intended only for preinstallation on customer systems that will be sold to end users.*

OEM is system builder, isn't it? That seems pretty clear, doesn't it?
https://www.microsoft.com/OEM/en/licensing/sblicensing/Pages/windows-licensing-for-personal-use.aspx

@scottalanmiller said in Paying to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10:

It's because VL is only upgrade

Ah yes! Of course. Good point

@scottalanmiller said in Paying to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10:

@Carnival-Boy do you have access to VL Open?

We do. I will look for pricing on that. So VL offers an upgrade version, but retail doesn't? Seems odd.

@scottalanmiller said in Paying to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10:

What about going for the $88 OEM deal? I know it is a pain compared to the full retail box, but even if you use every copy on two machines, it's much cheaper.

Doesn't an OEM licence have to be used on a brand new machine? Not sure what you mean by "use every copy on two machines"? I'm not very familiar with OEM licencing.