Friday, August 17

Here's a review of the Archos:

http://www.futurelooks.com/reviews/electronics/audio/MP3/Archos_jukebox_6000/page1_frame.htm



I'm serious: For $200 bucks I could have this USB file carrying box with images of disks, etc.



Right now I am trying to image machines in our labs for preparation for school on Monday. It's terribly frustrating because half the machines sit on one subnet, and half on another, and imagecast won't communicate across the subnets due to IP multicasting being shut off at the router level for some reason.



So I get one machine perfect, gather the image, and send it to about seven other machines at a time, because our sh*tty network is so slow that's all I can do. Meanwhile, people on real networks can image 30 machines at a pop.



Then I have to transfer the clone image to another imagecast control station on the *other* subnet. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour to send 1.4 gigs over the network, at 3.5 mbps. Then I image a handful of machines on the other subnet.



I could use the archos and at least hand carry the image over to the other imagecast control station, saving an hour here and there.



I'm ready to sit down and learn ghost, and just image each machine with an autobooting CD. Setting it up would suck, but it would only take three hours total to image 85 machines, as opposed to all of the dribs, drabs, false starts and file swapping with Imagecast on our crappy network.



Once I get these things imaged, I'll be set, because we have deep freeze installed so the machines won't degrade over time or get filled up with weird crap that people download. I'm starting to understand the whole appeal of thin clients. PeeCee's suck.

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