when all it takes is to feed them Linux.
Can’t you take them home? You could open a nice little business on the side.
Believe me I have tried.
Along with high end printers and scanners and servers and data domains.
Ever send a petabyte storage to the recycler?
I think some get resold but not until all methods of data storage have been removed and shredded by a certified company and frankly I believe that it in the end to be much, much cheaper and cost effective to simply shred a device and install a new one rather than have to build a government department with all the burocracy involved to recover a unit which out of warranty.
I have long given up looking for logic and I used to be annoyed and frustrated by such waste. I started asking questions and offered suggestions only to hit brick buroratic walls.
Now I just do my job and follow orders.
User: “My laptop is broken”
IT: “What is wrong with it?”
User: “Makes funny noises”
IT: “Oh, it nearing the end of it´s run time”
“Mr. Technician. change the laptop” (first techie)
…changes laptop…
User: “still noisy”
…Mr Techie. change docking station" (a different techie)
…changes dock…
IT: “It´s still noisy”
Que Slammer!
“its the loudspeaker on t he fucking dictaphone, nothing to do with the computer”
…
…
…
“Change the dictaphone!”
Sigh!
User: “My printer is not working”
IT: “Its from 2021. Out of it´s runtime”
Order to Techie…: Change the printer"
Techie. “It just needs a Reinstall of the driver” Cant do this myself because of not-my-job and dont have the level.
IT: “Cant, procedure not approved!”
Techie: installs a new 5000 euro printer and waves the old one goodby.
Sigh
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Start your own recycling company and get paid to take the gear. I know someone who did that and it was simply unbelievable the expensive and working gear he was getting.
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You would need to secure the government contract for that and bring a million or two to the table for the infrastructure.
I would be happy enough to take on the printers and scanners, but these are hard in the hand of a recycling company somewhere in Bavaria and they are not going to give up their rice bowl anytime soon.
Apart from that with the hundreds of printers being exchanged by my colleagues and myself you would need quite an operation setup.
The current Mac OS can be installed on any Mac produced since 2018, and some older Mac Pros. Apple still supports OSs released since 2022 (Sonoma).
I have a 10 year old laptop running win11. They will all run Win 11 if you install it properly.
My trusty Mac mini has been running since 2012. Installed a SSD in 2019 and updated to High Sierra soon after.
That is as high as it goes and my Affinity suite, plotter software, internet etc, just keep on running.
If it ever dies then it will be replaced by another Mac mini.
I don’t think that the problem is the hardware itself but lays more with the restrictions and demands of this governmental entity.
Alone their security settings have to be overridden just to be able to run the .exe.
At least on the older models I think that the installer simply gives up leaving the OS in an undefined state…
yep, I “know” this guy and his work around worked fine for win-11 22H2 but we are now facing 24H2. You might be told you can’t get it.
My PC is much older than 10 years.
still hoping to get an answer re how to handle security on Linux.
Windows had the Defender, I don’t know (yet) whether Linux has something similar.
I have 23H2 on my PC. Works fine. It does not want to update to 24H2.
I don’t have any antivirus, just basic system configuration. I’m rather thinking ahead, not downloading and running anything from anywhere. I first check what I’ve downloaded in virustotal, often even try it first in a virtual machine.
I do have “office machine” and another more powerful dev machine. On the dev one I do various things, but I never keep there any personal documents or even access sensitive data.
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It is not just laptops! It just about everything in todays world from electric toothbrushes and shaver to cars and trucks. Even household appliances. Hell a building gets to be 50 years old rip it down and build it new. Renovation costs too much. Plumber comes for a leaky faucet. Hell replace it. Washing machine button malfunctions. Replace it!
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Death of Skype email arrived at 21h00. There’s a FAQ here.
Will Teams Free offer paid calling options?
Microsoft Teams does not support paid calling plans on the free version of Teams, but small businesses can consider the Teams Essentials offering, which can be paired with Microsoft Teams Phone, a cloud-based call control solution.
I guess I need to find out how Microsoft Teams Phone works.
It’s quite right. Linux is still the minority as desktop system so the home users are not much the target. Bad guys are very active on Linux though as the majority of the cloud runs on Linux, however you won’t break into any cloud back-end via malicious web site exploiting the web browser or with phishing email. Apart from that Linux is really fast moving, patches are flying very fast compared to Windows, also IMO Windows remains the main target for attacks because of politics, Microsoft doesn’t want to break compatibility with old apps (because that’ll seriously annoy business users) so undiscovered holes stay there for very long (even when MS knows about a hole, they tend to discard many if those can be mitigated by antivirus software). Linux and macOS code base moves relatively fast which makes attacker life harder.
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Nope. It gets stuck, you take a knife (one you eat with, not one of these pointed, really sharp ones), you gently slide it between the button and the machine, wiggle a bit. Gently, always gently.
Works like a charm. Doing it for years now. 
Just today:
User: My printer is not printing and there is a red blinking light.
1st level: Ah! It´s from 2020, out of warranty. Need to be changed!
The House orders a new one.
Queue Jiira ticket. The order for a new printer is processed, released and sent to order management.
Order is processed and a new printer is taken from stock.
Sent to dispatch and delivered via a delivery service .
Arrival conformation is sent to 1st level, first level reports to our dispatch, dispatch sends techie.
Slammer arrived on site.
Takes one look at the old printer, presses “ignore letter format” and “continue”
With a sigh of content and a whirring of gears the printer springs to life.
Slammer tells the printer to ignore format and just print what you get on A4
Everybody happy, so Slammer slings the new printer into the Astra to take back to storage and buggers off.
10 minutes late gets chewed out for not replacing a working printer with another working printer because the Jira tickes cant understand a Storno.
So guess where I will be come Monday morning? Exchanging a working printer with a working printer.
If you see and logic here please let me know because I cant.
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Try WD-40 instead 
Take the original working printer home and all will be happy. You, your boss, your colleagues and the whole dam supply chain.
Did you say you work in a German government department?
You search for logic? Don’t you keep track on reports on how they spend tax-money? Your story fits like a glove.