Davel23

Intel has been identifying their chips with “Genuine Intel” for quite some time, that brought the term into the IT zeitgeist.

I think there’s an actual term for that.

“Intrusive thoughts”.

Several years ago I had a client who needed to be able to receive files from a client of theirs. This was before Dropbox and the like, so I just went in and set up a quick and dirty FTP server. Worked fine, client got their files, all was good with the world.

A couple weeks later: “hey, we have another client that needs to send us files, can you set them up on the FTP?” Sure, no problem.

Repeat for about the next six months. The thing turned into this huge glob of a mess that miraculously enough still worked.

Finally, I call up my contact there and tell him if he wants this to be a permanent solution we should go in and set it up right, and to do that I’m going to need a bunch of information from him, who needs access to what, who should not be able to access what, etc. He says fine, why don’t you come on over and we’ll hash it all out.

I go on-site, we end up having a 2-hour meeting (billed, of course) where we go over all this stuff, plenty of notes are taken, decisions are made. We wrap up, I tell him all I need now is the list of users and their access needs and I can clean the whole thing up.

I never got the list. The thing just continued to grow and grow into some kind of unearthly abomination. Fortunately, I left that job before the thing imploded completely. Someone else got to untangle that mess.

I once had a client who didn’t want to buy new Office licenses for their brand-new Server 2008 terminal server, so had us install an old copy of Office 97 they had lying around. Surprisingly, it worked.

If you really want to stick with Windows there are methods to bypass the CPU/TPM requirements of Windows 11.