Somewhat misleading!
You really do have to try and go out of your way to buy the Thinkpads that don't have the Intel Pro Gigabyte NICs - I believe only the basic T43's in the current models actually do. The T60 line does use the Intel. And the fact that they are not using Intel Nic's on these models is pretty evident on the website.
While disappointed in this, I however, do not think this is an issue with Lenovo cheapening things up. After all, the Broadcomm cards are used by IBM in their servers - That being the a good part of the reason I use 3Com or Intel Server Nics in all servers we do.
Privacy is important to any real network admin / computer support person.
Not only do we often has information up on our monitors that would compromise security if it was viewed by others, many of the phone conversations involved in resolving problems also contain information that may be sensitive. Someone close to my desk could pick up IP address, Router information, Type, model and OS version on our firewalls. For instance, we had a video conference with our manager on Friday regarding the implementation of the patches to our Cisco routers and whether it had to be done this weekend. He asked for the router passwords over the phone...his opinion is that EMail is unsafe. Then there is the other type of work we do.
For example, I was working on a report last week that basically involved some deep data mining of our health plan over the last five years. The benefits person, a sweet young thing of 55 going on 2000 was asking me how to take the data and apply various scenarios to it - such as increasing the employee contributions, reducing maximum payouts and removing some coverages. Its obvious from our conversation and from the data that cuts are going to be made. This sort of stuff is not something management wants to be public.
Wednesday, I had to recover about 100 EMails for our Human Resources person. Some of them included questions about Employee evaluations.
Some companies may not ever have their Net Admins talk on the phone or use their monitors to work on but we sure do.
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Somewhat misleading! You really do have to try and go out of your way to buy the Thinkpads that don't have the Intel Pro Gigabyte NICs - I believe only the basic T43's in the current models actually do. The T60 line does use the Intel. And the fact that they are not using Intel Nic's on these models is pretty evident on the website. While disappointed in this, I however, do not think this is an issue with Lenovo cheapening things up. After all, the Broadcomm cards are used by IBM in their servers - That being the a good part of the reason I use 3Com or Intel Server Nics in all servers we do.
Privacy is important to any real network admin / computer support person. Not only do we often has information up on our monitors that would compromise security if it was viewed by others, many of the phone conversations involved in resolving problems also contain information that may be sensitive. Someone close to my desk could pick up IP address, Router information, Type, model and OS version on our firewalls. For instance, we had a video conference with our manager on Friday regarding the implementation of the patches to our Cisco routers and whether it had to be done this weekend. He asked for the router passwords over the phone...his opinion is that EMail is unsafe. Then there is the other type of work we do. For example, I was working on a report last week that basically involved some deep data mining of our health plan over the last five years. The benefits person, a sweet young thing of 55 going on 2000 was asking me how to take the data and apply various scenarios to it - such as increasing the employee contributions, reducing maximum payouts and removing some coverages. Its obvious from our conversation and from the data that cuts are going to be made. This sort of stuff is not something management wants to be public. Wednesday, I had to recover about 100 EMails for our Human Resources person. Some of them included questions about Employee evaluations. Some companies may not ever have their Net Admins talk on the phone or use their monitors to work on but we sure do.