I talk from time to time on YOCF about what my qualifications would be for using an exceedingly old computer as a main system or in some kind of "productive" role. Usually, my qualifications for this begin (and possibly end) with being able to isolate the system in question on a network, or receive security updates. I often spin tales of folks who spend ridiculous amounts of money on a particularly mid-range or high end computer at some point in the past because they wanted to make a long-lasting business investment, only to later think about it and realize that my suggestions are probably a little unrealistic. (An amount of prodding from everybody else helps push this realization along, too.) Not impossible, but unrealistic.
And so I'm often brought back to my original suggestion that it's not something I'd do or endorse unless somebody cited some pretty specific reasons for it, including a significant investment in a machine and its ecosystem used for a specific purpose that is not networked. In general, I stand by this suggestion because it makes a lot of sense, not only from the p standpoint of security, but from the motivational aspect of performance. If I start using a computer for something (Let's just say it's "writing novels") at some point in the 1980s and I never change how I use that computer, there's not much motivation for me to move to a new computer.
Writing novels is ultimately a trivial task, computationally, and can be done on increasingly inexpensive software and hardware. What an author may have spent thousands of dollars on in the 1980s or early 1990s may now be available exceedingly cheap. A really good example of this is Microsoft Office. In 1993, a copy of Office for the Mac which included Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, plus a Mail client cost $475. For a few bucks more twenty years later, you can get Office pre-loaded on a computer with two gigs of ram and a 32 gigabyte solid state drive. As an added bonus, it has a variety of types of wireless communication available and cameras, just in case.
Let's think about something that's less trivial to bring forward to a new computer though. Let's say that in 1993, you bought a computer to do "various tasks" in your small business. I recently explored a situation like this on YOCF. What I ultimately ended up crafting was the simultaneously exciting and boring tale of an exceedingly expensive Macintosh Quadra 650, purchased from Apple right out of the "Fall 1993" catalog, which doesn't need to be expounded upon here in too much detail, save to say that it was a lot of computer in 1993, and the whole thing was very "mid-range." I decided that my business-person knew up front that they were spending the money on a long-term investment, so they bought a very nice system, monitor, printer, software, and even the backup media that was available in this particular catalog.
The system was to be used for, in no particular order:
- Creating presentations
- Writing various business documents (letters, etc.)
- Payroll
- Transaction logging and book-keeping
- Employee records
The idea was that the business might have multiple people using it throughout the day for various tasks and that ultimately it was going to be very productive for its lifetime, and its lifetime was going to be long, because it was bought with three or four printer cartridges capable of printing approximately 15,000 pages each. The other part of this idea is that the small business owner for whatever reason (fairly successfully) foresaw that the machine was going to be able to complete all of its duties within the limits of regular space-time and continue doing so for just about 20 years. (It would be 20 this coming October or so.)
My argument in this case was that the machine was ultimately suitable to the role and under the fairly specific circumstances of "isolated from the Internet" and "unchanging tasks" any computer would be reasonable to use for a few decades, barring hardware failure.
In unrelated events, I recently bought a third 750GB USB 3.0 hard disk, and had been planning initially on using it as a third disk in my backup rotation for the server. Before that happened, however, I first copied some stuff to it from another disk and then immediately gave up on that effort and made a Windows 8 To Go boot disk from it.
Windows 8 To Go is interesting for a number of reasons. For a start, it puts an interesting focus back on using external disks for actual tasks. This has been considered poor form recently and most people shy away from externals. Even I have been having a lot of trouble with desktop form-factor external disks. The other interesting thing though, is To-Go's claims on creating a safe, encrypted, pocketable workspace that is consistent from machine to machine and that you can use on (within reason) any recently shipped desktop or laptop PC.
Could there possibly be any relationship between this workspace and my missives on YOCF about extraordinarily expensive but long-lasting computers?
Maybe!
When I first encrypted the drive and installed Windows 8 on it (via my work PC, my workplace is properly licensed for Windows 8 To Go, which creates some interesting questions I may have to pose to my team later) my first action was to pull an old Dell OptiPlex GX620 from my coworker-neighbors who had just recently gotten done with it. I had been wanting to grab it anyway, mainly for Cinebench/Geekbench purposes, but the timing was convenient because I had just a) created something very nifty that needed testing b) cleared out some desk space.
The OptiPlex GX620 is an interesting system. This particular configuration has a 3.2GHz Pentium D processor, 4 gigabytes of memory (even though the 945 generally only uses 3.5GB), an ATi discrete graphics card appropriate for the era, and two 250GB hard disks. This system pours out heat, even without the disks running. It's actually pretty hilarious. At idle, it heats better than most of the other computers I use, including its direct successor, a high end Sandy Bridge machine, my personal server with eight disks, and a few other smaller machines I have at home.
So I ran cinebench and geekbench on it and thought for a while about how hilarious it was that I was using a system that did not have wireless networking, and into which I had not plugged an Ethernet cord. The background for the lack of Ethernet is that a Hewlett Packard thin client I've been testing out has the Ethernet line for this desk plugged in. I could probably move it, but that seemed like more effort than it was worth for some benchmarks.
I took the disk home at the end of the day and connected it to Eisbrecher, where it worked slightly faster (given that Eisbrecher has USB 3.0 to take full advantage of the speed of this disk, this is good) and where I was able to install a bunch of applications. I connected it to the network in order to activate Windows and Office (again, properly licensed) and took it back the next day to use it unconnected again.
In my use of it, which has been admittedly somewhat hampered by the fact that Eisbrecher is not my favorite machine at home, and looking at an un-networked machine at work often makes little sense, I've observed that the actual performance of whatever computer you're using seems to be nullified by the fact you are booting a full copy of Windows via USB 2.0 or 3.0 and are therefore limited to either your disk's interface (as in the case of the Dell 620) or to the disk itself, such as on Eisbrecher. It's worth noting here that I am not using a recommended or qualified disk for my WTG environment. My experiences would likely be a lot better if I ponied up the $130 or whatever it is for the qualified Western Digital disk, or if I were to put a fast SSD in a USB 3 enclosure. Because of this, Eisbrecher boots very slowly and both systems simply stall out for a few moments from time to time. It's not grossly hampering of productivity, but it would be bad if I had to use this type of environment on this particular disk full-time. It's a far cry from Eisbrecher's instant booting. I haven't used the 620 enough to know what that system is like under normal conditions, however.
With Office (well, Word so far), the setup is fairly decent. If I were the kind of knowledge worker whose job didn't really extend beyond having Outlook and one or two of the other Office apps open, I can completely see why it would be reasonable to use this kind of environment on hardware this old, and I suspect I would be happy to be provided a disk like this for use on my own hardware at home as well. It could potentially save an organization a fair amount of money on buying both desktops and laptops for people, or even a lot of floor space and equipment costs in offices that won't be fully utilized, especially in environments where people move around a lot or spend a lot of time using personal desktops and laptops outside of the office anyway.
In a lot of ways, this is a natural progression from an "idea" that Lenovo introduced a year or so ago: Secure Client systems. Lenovo's idea was that gigabit Ethernet on a switched network is pretty fast, so if you have a system boot from it, most users of Windows 7 will not notice. Therefore, you can save some cost on client boxes and gain some security by keeping all of your "data" in your datacenter, even if the actual "computing" must happen on desk-top boxes. I don't know how well this panned out and how much the infrastructure costs were going to be, but Windows 8 To Go (on fast enough drives, obviously) paves the way (maybe) for similar diskless client systems whose main purpose is to accept the WTG disk of whomever happens to be around at the time.
Using it on the 620 here in the office without a network has given me this very romantic image of the kind of reasons an individual or organization may have to run an unnetworked system today. Almost instantly, my mind was filled with visions of a very secret agent version of myself (slimmer, taller, slightly more athletic, but not bulky in any way) sitting at this particular system (I don't know why, other than that it's a well-matched set) in a large cavernous office, at a quite modern looking table with a good chair. I plug the disk in, power on the system and key in my BitLocker password before strolling around to manipulate some other things in the office, maybe grab a coffee, and then sit down, log in, and get to work on the super top-secret project. The new designs or the secure update or the epic report has to be finished expediently.
To this end, I've actually installed Visual Studio 2012 on here, and I've considered using my academic licensing from Autodesk to put some other tools on here I have wanted to learn. It's an interesting way to keep some tools I want to use a minority of the time actively available, but on any hardware I have free at the moment --I could use this disk on Illy or SuperSlab if Eisbrecher was busy, or I could move my work on Eisbrecher over to one of those machines and use the disk there if I needed to ensure I had the highest available performance. What sorts of secret projects are even possible on a 5400RPM disk connected via USB to a seven-year-old system? I haven't considered yet, but I could always hook it back up to my main PC (which also has USB 3.0) and go back to my original standby plan: after-hours gaming.
All of this without even a consideration as to what happens if the disk dies. That's unfitting for somebody as backup-focused as I am. Therein ultimately lies the rub: This disk, the OS install, my licensed applications and the data I'm creating (I'm writing this on the OptiPlex GX620 with no network connection as we speak) are ultimately at risk. I don't have any additional copies of the backup software I use on Windows 8 systems, nor do I actually have another disk or backup location to back up to, so my only option is to take data off of this system as soon as I'm done with it. When I finish writing this article, I'm going to dump it onto a USB stick and physically carry it over to a system that can access my server. In a corporate environment the disk could have File History enabled and pointing at a file server to which each employee has access as a way to preserve the important big: user generated data. Corporations are going to have pre-activated Windows+Office installs ready to reimage onto a new disk anyway.
Is using it the way I am practical? It depends. A faster disk and USB 3.0 ports all around would actually make it a very interesting option to investigate. My current work environment is set up so that I'm not sharing anything, but if I were in a hot-desking environment, I would almost certainly prefer this to multiple user profiles on the same computer, and it may be better than thin clients in certain situations.
For me, probably the other biggest disadvantage really is that I (for whatever reason) have had exceedingly bad luck using it with Macintosh hardware. This means that my fairly powerful Mac here at the office can't do anything with it, and that my reasonably nice, stationary, completely standard, Mac mini at home can't do anything with it. Each system gets as far as the BitLocker prompt and then blue-screens. This has happened multiple times on different Mac hardware.
Ultimately, I don't think there is very much merit for me in using an environment like this. At work, I have my own computers, and at home, each of my computers is unique in their drivers, and I also mainly have laptops, which puts a reasonably significant dampener on the usefulness of Windows 8 To Go, purely because most of my laptops are useless or boring without proper drivers for all of their hardware. Despite that, I still think it is very cool. The real connection between standalone computers and Windows 8 To Go seems to be that standalone computers are better when they've got all of their performance available (and that may be a reason to create a fully non-networked standalone computer). Windows 8 To Go seems to sap some of a computer's performance, possibly for BitLocker encryption, and possibly just because USB 2.0 is not a very good way to boot a relatively heavy operating system like Windows 8.