Windows XP Upgrades the Professional Way:
Why hand-me-downs need to be handled as clean
installs
The clean install approach to PC
configurations can be a real lifesaver in managing PCs that move
from person to person in your company as hand-me-downs.
In as much as this is a very common way to
extend the asset life of PCs, you need to know how to do it
right.
Let’s say your CEO has a relatively
high-end desktop PC that’s about a year old. The CEO decides
to go completely mobile and gets a notebook and docking station.
The CEO’s desktop PC gets passed down to an executive
assistant.
Then, a year later, this executive assistant
needs a PC with a 40GB hard drive for a streaming video
application. So, you take the CEO’s former PC off the
assistant’s desk and redeploy that PC to someone in the sales
department, who has relatively simple software requirements.
A few months later, this salesperson goes on
a brief maternity leave, after which she gets permission to
telecommute full-time for another few months. The
salesperson’s PC now goes home with her. What’s wrong with
this picture?
The salesperson on maternity leave has a
curious husband who one day stumbles upon a folder on the PC’s
hard drive with several Microsoft Excel workbook files. The
workbooks are date and time stamped from about 18 months ago,
around the time the CEO originally gave up the desktop PC. These
Microsoft Excel workbook files contain a series of tables,
listing year-end bonuses and salaries for everyone in the
company for the past five years. Ouch!
Because you weren’t yet a believer in
clean installations, or perhaps didn’t know how important
they are, that fatal folder of sensitive workbooks never was
cleaned out as the PC was moved from employee to employee.
