Reimage is Pure Evil

My work computer is slow. But it's not because of the hardware, it's not because I'm running extremely computationally expensive tasks, it's because of corporate stupidity.

I work for a large multinational company, which has a dedicated department for creating "standard builds". These contain everything from operating system, office, antivirus to our corporate utilities. Since everything in the images is preconfigured, the desktop guys completely lost the ability to troubleshoot. The path of least resistance is to simply reimage every computer they get their hands on.

This has three consequences:

• the corporate standard build has to fit all employees
• the desktop guys don't educate themselves
• even a monkey can be a desktop guy

The economical side of this solution seems favorable at first look, but I actually want to claim otherwise. Having locked down computer with standard builds actually costs more then having educated desktop department.

During my studies I used to work as the desktop department in a company of 70 people and I had never had to do a full reinstall. Everyone had administrative rights, when something went wrong I troubleshooted the computer spending from five minutes to three hours on a problem and I was able to fix everything. I explained the users what went wrong and gradually I had less and less work, because the users actually started to understand how computers work (I admit I was quite lucky).

True the employee to desktop guy ration was only 70:1, whereas in my current company is 199:1, but these guys are not even trying. Something is wrong on your computer? Bring it down for reinstall. No one learns anything and the problem is most likely going to repeat itself.

But that's not the worst part of it, the worst is the one size fits all approach. The computers come preloaded with so many utilities and services, that it literally takes minimum fifteen minutes to start up. In my case I have eight programs running under my account, which I have to kill after every startup, and 19 services which I don't use and which I can't do anything about without administrative privileges.

So for the convenience of the desktop department, everyone in the company spends first fifteen minutes waiting for the computer to start up. For one desktop guy to have easy and convenient work, 199 people have to suffer.

As a result people simply stop turning their computers off, they keep them running the whole night, wasting electricity.

Well done CTOs. I'm sure all the wasted mandays and electricity are much cheaper then to hire a couple more desktop guys.