The real problem is that they pay vastly over the odds for IT equipment and IT support staff who don't know their arse from their elbow. The people supplying them provide rubbish systems at excessive prices because they can get away with it.
So true. This summer the uni has upgraded all the computers to windows 7. In June or July IT services upgraded the computer running one of our analytical instruments...deleting the instrument software in the process. They only just got round to installing the software again a few weeks ago after the Science school had to REPURCHASE the software out of our own budget, only to discover that during the installation they had proceeded to delete the instruments chemical reference library. We're hoping in the next few weeks it'll be back up and running. Something that should have taken a day to do has taken months, and cost the school several thousand pounds when we already have a tight budget this year. It's the kind of thing that IT services should fork the bill for as we didn't want the computer updated in the first place, as already mentioned most instruments run on specific OS's just fine and don't need the latest hardware of software to run.
You can't exactly blame 100% of that on the IT department.
They will have likely been told that the leases or support contracts for the computers across the campus are being renewed and as such everything is getting upgraded.
Having some bespoke piece of software on really used in a specific field of science, f**k up and require re-licencing, etc... Well that's par for the course.
Now if it was MS Office that was screwing up or equally another "core" application available as part of the base build on your machines then fair enough, but your issue is just a typical issue you'll run into with projects in the millions, or billions of pounds.
