The joys of the computer business

I have made a name for myself taking care of non-profit organizations in their computer departments over the years. 3 of the clients have been using my company as their tech support department for more than 10 years. Every now and then, I get a call from a company wanting to make an equipment donation. Yesterday was a day we picked a load of it up. Gunnar, Jeff and myself (all Fort Factory team members too) drove the bus up and were slinging equipment all day. In the end, we got quite a nice donation in printers and computer equipment totalling more than $6K worth of stuff up to date companies would call crap, but the one thing I've pushed over the years is what exactly does the new hardware and operating systems do for us? Does it make it easier/faster/better? 9 times out of 10, the answer keeps coming back as a big NO. The upgrades get pushed on us by hardware and software manufacturers and while there are a couple improvements, they generally serve to increase anxiety amongst users who once again have to learn the new operating system and how to do this and how to do that and deal with the types of questions 'why doesn't the documents print up the same as they did on the old printer?'. I'm generally a step or two behind what is considered leading edge and you know, I like it like that. Let other people deal with the continual problems Microsoft has when the release their latest and greatest (Vista and Office 2007). I think the people at Microsoft have been dealing with the largest collective brain fart in history with these "upgrades". Dealing with the problems these packages have caused clients, I (and thousands of other techs) have probably boosted the use of Ibuprofin quite a bit and more than a few IT people have probably considered pot(medicinal use of course. I think Granny on Beverly Hillbillies always said that, but I don't think she was talking about the same medicine. She was always cooking some sort of munchies up though so maybe it wasn't just shine she was dealing with). I myself have looked to other systems and have been using FreeBSD extensively for my servers. Load and forget it. I like it when customers call me wanting to do something new and not fix something that shouldn't be failing because the software company uses the customers who buy the first version to figure out where the bugs are. There is only one problem with using FreeBSD/Linux/Unix operating systems. You do get put in this crowd.