Totally OT, but frustrated.....

On Thu, 2005-03-24 at 23:48 -0500, David V. Corbin wrote: Thin clients do a little better usually. Beats me what the heck a modern PC's BIOS does on startup by the way to make it take so long. Unless you're on a thin client... Umm... thin client...? ;) Hmm, on a > 1 scale a you-know-what can be useful there too as the customisation's only done once. Don't things like Norton Ghost take care of imaging a Windows OS between machines? Or do they only work when the source and target drives are the same size? And of course in the Unix world cloning a disk is easy as all the tools are already there. Bad block checking at OS install time is a necessity though - only solution I can think of there is to keep the OS on a small drive or partition. Memory tests on a "real" system need to be thorough at boot time too for obvious reasons; no way around that unfortunately - although an OS that had the option of testing memory that it needed to load into then background-testing the rest post-boot *might* be handy to people. Of course servers that need x MB of memory usually start up all the services that require that much memory at boot time, so it doesn't help much. Different for desktops though; 90% of the time I'm using about 30% of the RAM in this PC... I miss the days of the 8-bit "desktop" machines (CMB/Sinclair etc.) - turn it on and it's ready, no messing around... cheers J.