theres a very interesting write up here on how long this guy spent fixing computers on his network over the course of a month. he spend 11 hours on maintance work on the network. this week alone i have spent about 6 hours on stuff (2 hours installing and configing White box linux on the server, about an hour cleaning viruses and spyware off my sisters machine, about an hour setting the server up as a proper squid server with caching and also making it act as a network server, an hour updating my workstations software (gentoo) and about an hour doing misc tasks on the mac, server and workstation over the last white). so spending about 11 hours on stuff is about right for my month. my mams machine is due some updates soon. i have to get SSH working there properly. she has a linux box, BTW! anyway, interesting read.