re: IRS computers crashed 10 days after House committee sent letter asking...

quote:

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Go back and read my edit. Most IT shops are loathe to run a mixed environment so when they make the decision to swap users over, they do so with the quickness. With ~90k employees they could transition out a computer for something NICE ($2k, which is/should be about 2x what they need to for a good desktop) for every employee for about $180 mill (which is just a small portion of their +1.8B annual IT budget).

With all that said, I would be shocked if they weren't buying new machines and just putting XP on them (because they apparently aren't spending their IT money on backups, amirite?)

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I hear you Bard, but again here is my experience. You are buying off a government contract and as usual you can buy a computer on open market cheaper. SO the $2000 may be low. I had that conversation many times when I was a Fed. I could walk into Best Buy and purchase a more powerful machine for half the cost. Also, budgets don't allow for new machines to be purchased for everyone every year or even very 3 years.

What I'm trying to say in all these posts of mine is this: It all looks suspicious and there may be wrongdoing, but what many of you are latching onto as proof and or indications may not be so and can be explained. Huge federal agencies, their business practices and budget implementations can't be compare to private companies (and that may be unfortunate).