I'm currently on an engagement at a retail bank for a project that went entirely off the rails (they brought me in to right it). All of the following are curre

I'm currently on an engagement at a retail bank for a project that went entirely off the rails (they brought me in to right it). All of the following are currently running simultaneously: * McAfee * Tanium, which is constantly firing off massive Python scripts * Aternity * Windows Defender (which is well-behaved as expected) ... wait for it ... on an SSD that has no DRAM. Yes, a cacheless SSD. Performance isn't much better than a cheap USB flash drive, which is expected when an identical SSD costs $18 on NewEgg. The system is effectively I/O bound all the time. The quad-core (8th gen Intel core) idles at 70% utilization, constantly spiking to 100%. The commit charge for getting into the Explorer shell is 13.8GB of the 8GB of physical memory. The laptop itself appears to have a street value of about $240 on eBay. Quality unit with a 1366x768 TN display. ----- The 30 day discovery period is about to end. I am not supplying an SoW for any further work. I told them the reason nothing gets done by their teams is because the hardware they give everyone is trash, and I can't solve their architectural issues when IT doesn't supply tools to get work done. I wish them the best of luck.