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Thanks
looks like Dell would be a good bet - especially if I play them against Viglen!
There is no chance of any sort of rolling replacement at either of my schools - we just dont have the money and I'm afraid that neither head regard either: a) IT as important, or b) their own IT tech knowing what she is talking about.
I just don't have the clout that some of you lot do, it seems!
Anyway
I am armed with info, and dangerous!
Thanks
looks like Dell would be a good bet - especially if I play them against Viglen!
There is no chance of any sort of rolling replacement at either of my schools - we just dont have the money and I'm afraid that neither head regard either: a) IT as important, or b) their own IT tech knowing what she is talking about.
I just don't have the clout that some of you lot do, it seems!
Anyway
I am armed with info, and dangerous!
I have to also give a thumbs up to Dell. Have had no problems and they can be sourced at a reasonable price.
We bought 200 (ish) computers from one of our suppliers, this isnt a "preferred" supplier as we dont have to stick to that. For £200 we got a pc (sempron 2600, 40gig, 512ram) monitor, keyboard, mouse.
:) we know where to buy from :D
P.S i can give anyone who wants, the contact details
Sorry mis-read your post.
If you can't use Stone then I'd vote for Dell :)
Pity your CC is still in the Dark Ages by dictating who you trade with. You'd have thought that with more enlightened bursurs and IT staff schools could be trusted to make their own business decisions.
(I was going to add another sentence to that but it would have gone way off topic *cough* kickbacks*cough* :D )
Never, Never buy viglen, we had them here when I first came. Very poor quality, and overpriced, plus the h/ds kept failing. I replaced the whole network with Dells!
Avoid HP, got them at my place, and the warranties are not worth the paper they are written on, the techies they send out are not that good really, and when they are out of warranty, they sulk at standard off the shelf parts from Insight, CCL etc..... They now seem to be using modified PSUs (yes the old Dell trick is back!) according to some info I got from a HP insider, as well as locking the BIOSes down tighter than ever before for component support.
Dell machines are badly designed in terms of Airflow, had a few staff get dells, and all are now suffering with overheating problems as Dell still seem to like the huge heatsink on the CPU with 1 fan in the front or rear of the case and thats it, and on a Prescott P4, it just does not work well enough! Also when I wanted a quote from Dell at summer, it took 3 days and numerous calls to get a quote, needless to say they did not get the business.
Out of your list, I cannot think of anybody that really hits me in the face, but XMA can sometimes get hold of a very wide range of machines. If they can get NEC, give them a good look over as they seemed very good kit when I examined one of there latests ones recently, I wanted NEC at our place over HP (as we had to have a big brand as "people would not respect none branded machines!!!" - Next we will say all staff and students must wear Prada, Gucci etc.. as we won't respect each other in Asda George!). My view was to show that it doesnt matter what name it says, so long as its good, stable, has excellent warranty support and does the job and lasts 5 years thats all that matters to me.
So, that is most votes for Dell then - except when they are rubbish!! We have Dell laptops and I have found the support OK - I even got an unreserved apology when one of their engineers reformatted a laptop for me (when I wasnt there, the curse of being a part-timer) without bothering to ask if we had the Office discs. Which we didn't as the machines had come with it preinstalled by the reseller!!
Re the new machines: it is entirely possible that my wishes and research will be completely ignored, and the head and deputy (an ex RM man) will do EXACTLY as they like.
Thanks for all the advice
Now all I need is assertiveness training (if you knew me, you would know this is a joke - the hair colour of my avatar is true to life!!)
I prefer the HP kit to the Dell kit. I've found them to be very reliable and the build quality is far higher - metal cases over those plastic ones that scuff before you get them out of the box is just the start!
I've heard bad reports about Stone too but haven't used them myself because I tend to stick with big brands (HP being my favourite and the likes of Dell, IBM, NEC...)
NEC are also good at supplying demo machines for evaluation, plus they come with 3y NBD warrenty as standard. Will be looking at these myself in few months.
I have to say that overall I'm happy with our Dell kit, the only problem is when something goes wrong I have to go through their troubleshooting crap on the phone for half an hour before they send someone out.
Me: The PSU's broken
Dell: Can you remove the power cable for 30 seconds then try again
Me: Already done that
Dell: Does it work now?
Me: No
Dell: Have you tried a different power cable
Me: Oh how stupid of me, I should have thought of that first
Oh and refuse the first price Dell give you, my rep knocked 16k off a quote for almost 50 workstations just because I said it was too expensive a few times.
LOL! We told HP to forget that mumbo jumbo with support, and we now do it all online and the account is setup for just parts only if we ask for them, we had to agree to do it, but it has improved things in terms of getting the replacement parts.
The HP boxes are metal, and fairly strong, appart from the power buttons as they are not too strong now, but the rest of the design etc is education proof as it were.
Stone were at my last place, never again! They were shocking, support was good if I said I want a new Hard Disk, I got it with no messing me around, but appart from that, the hardware was not that good, and they seem to have a high DOA problem last time I spoke to a head that purchased some stone stuff (although I will say that North Yorks CC had had them 1st to Image them)
I would go for Dell as well. Though on the support front get them to throw in Gold support for free it mean you save 10 minutes per fault. I've even got them to replace mice on a regular basis. If you want to do a blind test post your exact spec I'll mail it to my rep and see what price she gives.. lets see if they are playing fair with you. Our LEA went to Dell and got the price for a standerd PC for all the primary schools kit for a year an boy it was low. If this group pulled together it would have hugh influence over the prices on offer.
Who's paying for them? if it's the LEA themselves then I can see you having to use their suppliers but if it's the School tell them to go stuff themselves and buy from where you want to.
Ben