The Glade 4.0

I keep personal files on my work laptop, which runs Windows XP, but not on the server I VNC into.

Linux is necessary to build C source. If you customize your text editor well then you can get stuff done really efficiently. I like Windows a lot, but some programs (like Outlook Express) are very clunky and irritating.

I've read the title of this thread at least a dozen times, and each time it was "Aaargh it!", kind of like "Charge it". This is the first time I read it as "I.T."

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Wow that's kind of nutty. All our mydocs and desktop files get moved to Old_Desktop file whenever someone gets re-imaged for whatever reason. No work files should be saved locally but we've all seen the user that can't find their desktop because of files.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Most people don't build C source. Also, Outlook Express, while included in Windows, is not a component of Windows. There's no reason anyone should use it.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Ditto and each time a picture of a pirate runs through my head.

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Well, I don't understand why they would just wipe her machine without at least making a token effort to find any local data that needed to be saved. That said...

Storage is so cheap, and data security is so important and fundamental to any corporate IT infrastructure that you really should look into getting an adequate amount of "network" storage space. Start using folder redirection to make My Documents, etc. redirect to a (private) network location for all your users. Make it clear to your users that anything they give a damn about should be stored either there or on a public network share. This will drastically cut down on these kinds of incidents (intentional, accidental, or unforseen) even without going to extra lengths to hide the local machine drives.

Secondly, with respect to your old DOS programs, are these due to regulatory requirements (I'm thinking HEC, TR-20, TR-55, etc.)? Some of these do actually have windows versions these days. But if for some reason you're actually locked into one of the old DOS behemoths, it would probably behoove you to get DOSBox for these anyway. Staying on XP indefinitely is not a viable long-term strategy. Sooner or later, you will have to update to Vista+. The issue here is the ntvdm (NT virtual dos machine) has gone away, and with it, 16-bit Windows emulation. Windows-on-windows (wow.exe) is now strictly for 32-on-64. So you're going to need it anyway to continue using this stuff in the future. But regardless of that, there are various ways you can use DOSBox to smuggle network locations into your DOS environment in a way that's transparent both the emulated OS and its applications.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

These, in part (though TR55 is better handled in a spreadsheet). (I know there is a windows version of TR20, but periodically we need to take an old model and recreate it - the coding in the new version will produce different results for the same input.) There are other regulatory items, as well as 3rd party programs designed to work for a specific task that are rarely used, but needed periodically.

I'll take a look at that DOSbox thing and see if that works.