Just a little curious, as I've jsut recently started looking into deckers in depth. God knows why since they'll be obsolete soon, but that's neither here not there.
Anyways, specifically i've been looking at the whole dumb/smart frame/agent section. Some interestingstuff in there, especially agents, since you can really get some good skills in there for them . But if you want to load on any heavy programs (as in high ratings) they really become very specialized, and hard to give them multiple tasks.

For example, if you have an agent with a high access prog, and a good sleaze, while still keepin a decent initiative, it's a good agent for getting into places, but can't do as much once it's there, due to the limited amounts of programs it can carry under it's frame rating (also assuming you gave it a top notch skill rating, or frame rating , or whatever). Am I missing something here? Most of what I've seen in the fluff and novels suggests that frames and agents are mostly used fro datamining without the decker. But I have a hard time seeing most being ale to do this on any but the lightest systems due to the limits of the programs they can carry.

Am I missing something, it simply doing something wrong? They seem more useful for the decker to load and perform one specific type of system operation then to that the decker doesn't have to keep all of these other programs uploaded all the time, which doesn't really seem worth it for the time that goes in to building them.

What do you use them for, or find them the most useful at? Am I simply not looking at it right?

1) Let's say-just for shits and giggles-that you don't immediately sell your old cyberdeck when you get enough nuyen to get the next model up. Rather, you strip it down a bit and install a dumb frame.

Load it with a Guardian program and this is your new answering system. You load it to accept or decline calls depending on who is calling. Depending on who calls, it might give them a message or send the caller a file. If this is someone you don't like, it could hold a virus.

2) A smart frame could be loaded with a decker's search program (p.254) and a Sleaze or Evaluate program. This can cut down considerably on the time a decker spends searching for simple information...or the decker can upload the smart frame to a host and tell it to download whatever looks interesting.

3) An agent can serve in any number of regards: a shieldbearer (loaded with Restore and Medic), a plaguebearer (loaded with viruses and worms to infect a host), or bombsquad (Decrypting and Defusing datafiles) among others. A particularly good agent could make a run on a system by itself given good orders.

A neat trick for agents is to install a small BattleTac Matrixlink program. In this way, the decker and her agent(s) can keep in contact to concentrate fire on a piece of IC, to distract the IC while you carry out the mission, or any other task you care to think of.