Very interesting post, Justin!
I have to admit, this is one of the quagmires that i've seen out these days. Right now, where I work we are nothing but a 100% Microsoft shop. I gotta put up with the net admin hounding me about Linux vs Microsoft, TCO's, etc etc.
Quite frankly, while he has a lot of valid arguements, (training costs, training time) one arguement that hurts BOTH sides is the memory utilitization.
I'm a lot like many of the IT pros out there.. I prefer to leave my desktop on, all the time. Saves us all trouble from logging in, starting up, waiting for the pc to become useful, right ? The downside is.. the longer the system stays up, the more memory hogs that can get loaded. This same issue attacks Linux as well.
Whenever I hear problems like this, I prefer to tell the user to try rebooting first, clear out the memory. Usually works. OpenOffice only slows down for me when I have had like 30 apps open for 24 hours or so (i've done 40 acrowss the 4 desktops i had in Gentoo once.. slowest machine I've ever seen).
General Rule of thumb I've discovered: For every day loaded, consider 24MB of RAM used. for every week of uptime, 100MB of RAM. That's the bare essentials, not counting any apps that might be loaded at the time.
but as always..
Your Mileage May Vary
-- Joe Brouhard 1st Degree Black Belt Decided Certified Trainer \ Demo Team Captain Chan's ATA Leadership and Black Belt Academy [email protected]