It's a sweet setup. Dell 690 1kw machine. Dual/Dual cpus, XP64, Quadro4600, 8GB ram dual 15k drives, and that great big 30" LCD.

Out of the box it's a really quiet machine. No, not sound quiet, though I can't really hear it over the ambiant. It's computationally quiet. I loaded the sysinternals filemon and regmon. Neither shows hardly any activity, unless I'm actively doing something. Quite unlike the corporate paranoid-ware laden pc this will be replacing.

One thing I like is that the machine arrived with a standard load of XP64 on it. Not one sign of bloat ware!!! Not even the seemingly obligatory 60 day trial of Office. The only thing on the desktop was the trash bin. Woot indeed!

To bad I have to let the system admins muck it up. Their idea of configuring a new machine is to copy the disk image of an existing machine over what is currently installed. Never mind that the hardware in the machine is unlikely to be the same rev through out as that machine purchased a month ago.

To be sure that is the situation here. Where is breaks down is when the machines need different drivers for best operation.

Then there is the new security policy/software update of the day, which is always pushed out in mass, without notice. It's supposed to only happen on Thursday. But there always seems to be some threat so despicable that it must be patched now.

The week after patch Tues. is alway hell. A system that had been running smoothly will just get squirrelly. It usually takes 2-3 restarts to get sorted.

Mind you, I'm all in favor of AV software as a necessary evil. But it's kind of hard to swallow the hit when I routinely open 2000+ files during a day. (Cad software does that these days)

Maybe you could find a CAD program that runs on a real operating system. I know that all the big companies out there prefer writing programs for toy operating systems, but surely there's something.

One of my tech PCs just got 'refreshed' with a Dell 490. It is a nice machine. If it is too quiet for you, try running it with the case open. It gives a warning that its cooling solution has been compromised and runs all the fans at full speed. One of the guys that sits across from the lab area asked (over the partitions) what the hell all the noise was.

Pro/Engineer is about as real as it gets in the cad world.

Interesting, I haven't cracked the case yet.

We migrated from UniGraphics off HP boxes to UniGraphics on Windows. It would be really hard to argue that is not a real CAD/CAE/CAM system, either.

I've run Pro/E on Sun. Ranging from Sparcstation 1 all the way up to an Ultra 60.

I'd rather run Pro/E on Unix. Heck I rather run everything on Unix, Not gonna happen. Well... maybe if Apple takes over the market.

Ahh! I figured out what it was I was trying to say...

The fact that windows, by it's self, a big security hole, has a hacker fanbase - Does that mean the security geeks and system admins get a free pass to mess with a machine, on a daily basis?

For instance the geeks (in the worst sense of the word) routinely launch scans that amount to DOS attacks. In the middle of my workday. That's effed up.

Well, it's "their" machine and "their" network. Have you complained that they are inhibiting your ability to do your job properly?