Are you forced to use XP at work?

My hard drive at work died, so the IT department brought me a "new" workstation about 2 weeks ago. I though "Oh, great...I can finally get an updated system, maybe Windows 7 and more RAM and a decent CPU" I was so excited.

They brought me an Athlon 1640b system with 1GB of RAM (2 X 512MB) and Windows XP SP3.

It must have been sitting on some shelf somewhere for years. I promptly ripped into a spare machine and "borrowed" the RAM from it so I have 1.5GB now. It's almost unbearable to use this stuff for 8-9 hours per day when I go home to 4 (four) systems that have better hardware.

Are you also forced to use this kind of hardware at work...I guess they are paying me to use it but, it's hard sometimes.

Yeah Im going to bet a lot of people are stuck on using XP at work. Im one of them. It drives me nuts to use XP all day then go home to a much better system with Win7. My biggest complaint at work is being forced to use IE6 the security holes are so big Air Force One sits nicely in them, and to make things even more fun they have added a new software package that disabled all USB items so no FireFoxPortable anymore

You guys are lucky. You won't believe what I have to use at work. Highlight for answer: 2 70's John Deere 4020's and a 90's 2440.

I actually work for a company based in Ireland. World-wide with 40,000 employees in North America alone. I guess it's a lot of $$ but they have to upgrade sometime. I wish XP support would end.

My current machine at work runs XP and, compared to my previous one which ran 2K, is a reasonable performer. The 2K one was a pain in the proverbial - it took 10 minutes from switching on before it came to the first login screen.

Most of the problems with work machines stem from the fact that the installed memory is woefully inadequate (usually 128MB and ocassionally 256MB), in my opinion, to run anything more demanding than 98. Because my current machine uses the same type of memory as my home system, I was able to use the spare 1GB stick that came with my motherboard (I replaced that with a 4GB dual-channel set) to boost its performance. Login times came down from around 4 minutes (for that machine) to just under a minute. Application response improved as well.

Tip: If you are able to get into your BIOS setup on your systems, disable any hardware such as COM (serial) and parallel printer ports, floppy drive (if your system doesn't have one). This will free up valuable resources and, if your system is low on memory, it can make a difference, albeit a small one. The best way to improve performance, though, will be to install more RAM.

Jimbo is right, a lot of companies have changed their update cycles to a very long run now since the hardware is so powerful. A ton of desk workers doing spreadsheets don't need the latest hardware. Id just like to not have to use IE6...boy does that bug me.