Computer Replacements

[hipsterdoofus]

Obviously in every case there are budget constraints, etc. But I'm just curious

1. Do you replace a certain number of computers per year based on the budget?
   
2. Are there certain "lower priority" computers that you simply just wait for them to die?
   
3. When you replace computers, do you do any type of cable management?
   

 

The thing that has prompted me to ask this is that what we have done in recent years is replace certain ever 3-4 years based on warranty status. What we then do is take the old computers and replace some other lower priority ones that one run one or two tasks. At issue is the fact that doing this double cycle in the place of a year seems to eat up an crazy amount of time, especially considering that we try to do some decent cable management with velcro strips. At one point, before I knew what I was doing, we had images that were model specific, so it was a big deal to tie a certain type of image to a particular model. Now, though, I use MDT, so this is not an issue. I'm considering on that "lower tier" of computers now, just not doing regular replacements on them and keeping a certain number of spares in case they happen to go out on me. Or if nothing else, letting them go quite a bit longer til replacing them. Just interested in how others handle this.

[Fazza]

1) As many as we possibly can squeeze out of the budget - sometimes its just a few but it can be as many as several computer suites. Depends how the computers perform, one year we purchased a load of RAM and SSD drives to upgrade some PCs rather than replace them as they were OK but just needed a bit more oomph!

 

2) We call then Staff computers!

 

3) We cable tie all the cables together with, er, cable ties! Cheap but effective and easy to sort out if we have to replace a keyboard/mouse etc.

[hipsterdoofus]

1) As many as we possibly can squeeze out of the budget - sometimes its just a few but it can be as many as several computer suites. Depends how the computers perform, one year we purchased a load of RAM and SSD drives to upgrade some PCs rather than replace them as they were OK but just needed a bit more oomph!

 

2) We call then Staff computers!

 

3) We cable tie all the cables together with, er, cable ties! Cheap but effective and easy to sort out if we have to replace a keyboard/mouse etc.

 

Thanks for the reply. In our case, the staff computers are usually more high priority. I am at a library, so our lower priority machines are those, for instance, that are used primarily for a library catalog. Essentially all they do is run a browser.

 

We have used cable ties in the past. The nice thing about the velcro - I think the cost may be higher initially, but the beautiful thing is, you can re-use it!

 

Also, is it just me, or does anyone else wish you could replace business level mice and keyboards by unplugging at the device, rather than having to replace undo the whole cable? We have had a limited number of keyboards in the past that were somewhat like that. They had a short pigtail USB cable that you plugged into an extender, so it was much easier to replace!

[LeMarchand]

:pound::pound:

 

Sorry - I work in primary schools, so any sort of refresh cycle is an anathema to the heads. Kit gets used until it falls apart, then the innards are used to keep other machines going.

[ITGURU]

We used to have a refresh every 3 years in the ICT suites, then those machines would move on to be teacher PCs and the teacher PCs onto students.

Now it's usually as many machines as we can for the money, when I'm told we have some!

 

Admin/Deputy heads have the highest Spec PCs as do a lot of SIMS work, Followed by staff Pcs which are Quad Cores, then Student PCs are Dual Cores currently, however they'll hopefully be replaced over the next few years in phases due to the quantity.

 

Usually we wait until they are end of life and have a daily visit to sort out issues then they are looked at being replaced. We replaced the computers in a suite last year that caused us issues daily, and the first call to the room was after 6 months and that's was only because of a broken mouse!

[newpersn]

We used to have a refresh every 3 years in the ICT suites, then those machines would move on to be teacher PCs and the teacher PCs onto students.

Now it's usually as many machines as we can for the money, when I'm told we have some!

 

It rooms get done every 5 years. Oldest spec now is 2nd gen i3 4gb 160gb HD.

 

The old computers from the it room go round the school.

 

 

Admin/Deputy heads have the highest Spec PCs as do a lot of SIMS work, Followed by staff Pcs which are Quad Cores, then Student PCs are Dual Cores currently, however they'll hopefully be replaced over the next few years in phases due to the quantity.

 

Usually we wait until they are end of life and have a daily visit to sort out issues then they are looked at being replaced. We replaced the computers in a suite last year that caused us issues daily, and the first call to the room was after 6 months and that's was only because of a broken mouse!

 

I'm sure the SIMS server dose all the leg work. All admin or office computers are dual cores. Some are I3 and some are 8 year old pentum dual core which work fine.

[nickbro]

We had two cycles going on, both 5 years.

 

One refresh happened back in April, with over 120 desktops being replaced and 60 laptops brought, this year it was £50k's worth of kit.

 

The other cycle has the infrastructure (server, switches, and two main ICT suites on it), currently we have 4 servers and 65 desktops on this cycle.

 

We've moved to using a capital loan from county instead of leases.

 

 

As for the desktops, went for Core i5 desktops from Zoostorm, with the cascaded pcs going to local primary schools, or will be sold off. Core i3 on the laptop front.

 

Admin staff now nearly all have shiny new Core i5 desktops, although some pcs are old Core 2 Duo's, but that accounts for about 10 pcs.

 

 

The server is the main thing with can slow SIMS down, the pcs do next to nothing. Most of our SIMS work is actually conducted by 4 staff members, the teachers don't all have access to it as we use Go4Schools for Attendance/Reporting/Behaviour

[ITGURU]

I'm sure the SIMS server dose all the leg work. All admin or office computers are dual cores. Some are I3 and some are 8 year old pentum dual core which work fine.

 

Some processing is still done by the client - we have Admin staff with i7 8GB RAM and I've had SLT come to me saying they are authorising better computers for data manager etc but I tell them they have the highest spec computers in the school as apparently some of the time when running reports etc they time out, but when run directly on the SIMS Sever work fine without timing out.

[nickbro]

If it times out then that's usually a sign of a network issue (it may just be a small slow down). I had the issue where a report would timeout on one area of my network, but would run fine from my pc (which was connected to the core switch), tracked it down to the PC only running at 100mbps instead of 1gbps, fixed the cable which seems to have fixed the problem.

[ITGURU]

If it times out then that's usually a sign of a network issue (it may just be a small slow down). I had the issue where a report would timeout on one area of my network, but would run fine from my pc (which was connected to the core switch), tracked it down to the PC only running at 100mbps instead of 1gbps, fixed the cable which seems to have fixed the problem.

 

Nothing else is slow though, 10gig backbone 1gig to each pc, I just think it's down to the amount of data it's trying to retrieve. and/or sql timeout issue.