Rolling Out the New CADstations

New CADstations will be rolling out this week, mostly Wednesday through Friday with roughly equivalent numbers each day. It's not too tough. Twenty new machines and re-imaging the old dual-core 3GHz machines. I convinced management to upgrade those machines to 4GB RAM but that has not yet happened.

Now to backtrack a bit. Ordering of the new PCs did not take place the day on which purchase was approved, that being Friday. It wasn't until Tuesday that the order was placed. When we ordered the prototype machine it took about two weeks for arrival. With the larger order, it only took two days before we received a portion of the order. Over the next week, portions of the order began to arrive with all of it in by the end of the week.

A beta PC was setup for a number of us to try out. Unfortunately it seems that some people were simply infatuated with the bells and whistles of Windows Vista than spending time testing out programs. A few programs needed to be added. Some we had to give up for now since the software companies have yet to issue versions for the new OS. All things considered it's going to be a bit interesting running WinVista.

We are also experiencing problems with a server becoming inaccessible as the network drives are unavailable. I don't think there's any correlation to the upgrade to WinVista but the problem is a bit strange. Perhaps it's a secondary issue somewhat related to the upgrade. We definitely have another glitch with one of enterprise software packages and the IT team has been in contact with the software company to get things resolved.

I'm supposed to get a new machine tomorrow but I did not yet seen one of the IT guys today. I did manage to offload several GB of data to an external hard drive. I run a number of other programs for my particular needs in design work and document manipulation. I'll slowly add those back onto the new PC as needed. Some I might need to upgrade to WinVista versions.

More later this week.