You make some excellent points. My experience have been with Windows. The situation is this – they install shitloads of programs on these machines (most of it BS) . This all run at startup – the system tray is half the taskbar.

All this crap makes the machine maddingly slow. Then they mount network drives on the machines (20 or so). This means that if you use a flash drive you must start unmounting the network drives until your flash drive appear.

While you log-in 10 or so programs give you error messages (for which you must press the Ok button).

The quotas are still a problem – why must we have 100MB quotas? Hard-disk space is cheap – google gives me 7GB for email.

The worst is the internet costs. They give you 200MB for a year. After that you have to pay R2 (20 US cents) per M.B. That price is four times as expensive as GPRS through your cellphone.

Oh – it is crap working on CRT screens with a burned in log-in bar.

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Ranting aside – the admin for the clusters in my dept. really knows his stuff.