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@BPFH said:@snoofle said:As an example, my brother is a CPA. He has about 10 PCs in his office. He refused to move off of Win-98 until each PC physically died. He didn't care that once he started replacing individual PCs, there were incompatibilities, etc. He didn't care that some of the newer software wouldn't run on Win-98. He couldn't run his business without software or computers, but he simply won't spend money on them. Even today, he still has one Win-98 machine, six on Win-XP, and two on Win-7. His file server is running $Deity-knows-what, and there is a warning duct-taped to the box: DO NOT TOUCH THIS MACHINE - IT IS FRAGILE. I don't even know what to do with that, but 20 years of pleading with him to let me straighten things up a bit have fallen on deaf ears.
I used to work for a company that made tax and accounting software, so yeah, that sounds about right for an accountant/CPA - fairly typical, actually. We had customers that left us when we stopped developing the DOS-based version of our tax program in (IIRC) 2001 or 2002, and when asked they explicitly said it was because they didn't have a computer capable of running Windows. I can understand not wanting to toss it until it's fully depreciated, but geez...
Gotta say that my lawyer clients were worse. The strangest mix of spend-what-you-need-to-keep-them-billable and don't-spend-more-than-you-have-to that I ever worked with. Getting gear for the lawyers - no problem. Getting a replacement for the mission critical bililng system running on 7U Compaq servers with NT4 and MSSQL6.1 - no way. And yes, they were running NT4 in 2007...