After 300 Netbooks

[mthomas08]

Right time for suppliers to shine or point me in the right direction.

 

Currently in a new job and the school is after:

 

Roughly 300 netbooks (exact number I will get but enough to cover new year 7s+30 spare)

Charging trolley for 30

Netbook cases for all

 

Spec needs to be pretty exact to below:

1GB Ram

10.1inch screen

Windows 7 starter

costing roughly 200-300 each

 

Now here is the tough one, we need to be able to repair them on site and insure them. We previously had a contract with Toshiba/insurance company, 3 year warranty we had to send a technician off on a course (we paid for it).

 

Not here to start a fight over other products/solutions because this discussion has been done and dusted before I walked in the door.

 

I am in the process of contacting a lot of suppliers and companies so I am waiting for responses galore and so far not many are able to get what we need.

[fiza]

Havent most manufacturers stopped making netbooks?

[mthomas08]

Managing to find netbooks but its finding the right spec + ability to repair on site which is being very tricky.

[bondbill2k2]

I'd personally avoid netbooks if you plan on just running on that hardware without any form of vdi setup and for that price you'll struggle to find any decent spec. As fiza said most companys have gone away from them. I would recommend the Dell Vostro series for a low end well built laptop with much higher quality then any netbook I've come across, fairly recessed keys plus spill resistance, easy to maintain, simple part replacement and not too bad for their price. Netbooks are a nightmare for on siet repairs they are often cheaply made and designed to not come apart with ease often requiring EVERYTHING to be removed for simple repairs, a batch of EEE's we have require the whole thing to be taken apart to swap the HDD over them and the Bios batterys died after 2 years plus the plastic feels dead cheap and flimsy.

 

We have around 30 vostro v131's now about 3 years old and nothing has gone wrong on 1 of them, just accidental damage of screens which cost around £40 to buy and 2 minutes to fit, couple of damaged keys which have been easy to repair as the deep key style means they often just click back on.

Edited April 18, 2013 by bondbill2k2

[TheScarfedOne]

Id get in touch with @StoneComputers. They have engineers who will come to site, and have an good warranty record with us. Edited April 18, 2013 by TheScarfedOne
Added link to users

[bondbill2k2]

Id get in touch with Stone. They have engineers who will come to site, and have an good warranty record with us.

 

At my previous job we had stone support on the desktops, must say they were always next day on site and can't fault them for that altho some of the hardware had very common faults including the micro case fronts which were always breaking which I wouldn't put down to damage as the the heads, 3 members of SLT and two staff office ones all broke, thankfully after several emails they send me a box of them out so I could swap them over as originally they sent someone on site each time to click on a new front! Their engineers are very helpful and knowledgeable too!

[Danp]

Netbooks, really? I would expect these harder to come by now and would they really be up to another 3 years use?

 

I am sure @Millgate can help you out with the stock.

[Millgate]

Netbooks are dead now unless you find someone who has that amount left in stock. The vendors stopped making them

[StoneGroup_Community]

From our perspective, it would be fair to say the Netbook market is 'evolving'.

 

Win 7 Starter is now end of life, hence the cost delta that used to exist between Netbooks and Notebooks is no longer present. This has meant all OEMs have come away from this technology over the past 6 months.

 

That said, we are exploring the implementation of a Netbook replacement product for launch in Oct 2013 at a similar if not lower price to the range you mentioned, on an 11" platform running Intel Pentium Dual Core Celeron processors.

 

We already offer lots of customers 'train the engineer' accreditation for Stone warranties.

[VeryPC_Colin_F]

Hi Mthomas08,

Yes unfortunately netbooks are not around in big numbers anymore,

Recently we’ve been working closely with Toshiba UK, specifically their education team. They have a great new product in the pipeline, its halfway between a netbook and a laptop.

They also provide a self-maintain school programme, with this they will provide 2 school members with full training on how to fix the products as well as provide all parts needed for the fix the problem

Ill PM you some more details

Thanks Colin

Edited April 18, 2013 by VeryPC_Colin_F

[Norphy]

That said, we are exploring the implementation of a Netbook replacement product for launch in Oct 2013 at a similar if not lower price to the range you mentioned, on an 11" platform running Intel Pentium Dual Core Celeron processors.

 

Not that this isn't an interesting tidbit of news but which processor are you going to be offering, the Celeron or the Pentium? They're not the same thing

[StoneGroup_Community]

Yeah you're right. Pentium Dual Core as a brand mention hasn't been used for a couple of years now either. My bad! In today's language, it would be a Celeron. Not sure about your experience, but In my experience, Celeron has challenges in that people just associate it with an entry level single core consumer chip of old rather than the modern dual-core offering. You wouldn't bet against a further tweaking of the processor names in the future.

[Norphy]

Intel are still using both Intel and Pentium branding but by the looks of it, Pentium is being using in "value" desktops while Celerons are being used in laptops.

 

In my experience at least (and I remember right back to the original cacheless 266MHz Celerons), Celerons were always OK as a workhorse CPU and I've owned a few in my time. Both Pentiums and Celerons are based on current Intel CPU tech (Sandy and Ivy) so they'll be an order of magnitude better than the Atom garbage that went into netbooks!

[StoneGroup_Community]

Yeah, the Pentium Dual Core (PDC) brand is gone though - Pentium Dual-Core - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Sounds like you've been through all the changes and still retained excellent knowledge of the Intel roadmap, which is no mean feat.

[jamin]

+1 to Stone onsite repairs, very good service.

[Steven_Cleaver]

+1 for Stone although not sure they offer onsite support for devices other than Desktops as we had a couple of Classmate II's that had faults and had to send these back for repair.

[Norphy]

I think that Classmates are the exception, we have these as well as Stone badged Clevo laptops and they come out to repair the Clevos and send the Classmates off to be repaired.

[mthomas08]

Thanks guys, had a few PMs as well.

 

Unfortunately I now have a week Tuesday to not only come up with something but have a few on site for parents evening, new job I started this week. If I choose different products then obviously its training and cost is also a strong factor.

Have a few options that's for sure.