Larry Stotler wrote:

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The inclusion of zenworks is a little intriguing as I have some familiarity with the commercial variant of the beast, cannot see it being of benefit to SOHO users, but if some the workstation management stuff is in place could rather useful for multi-machine environments. Seems to be rather undocumented .....

And a resource hog on older machines. Most recommend removing it during install.

Zenworks makes sense when you have a reasonable number of machines (>20) and have the resources to setup a local repository that can sync with external sources. In conjunction with Novel Directory Services it offers formidable centralised workstation management capabilities. It makes little sense on a single machine, or a machine sitting on a slow network link or as a standalone. It really should be an option rather than a default for the majority. My kit is not exactly new (> 2 years old) and I have so far noticed no major performance issues.