indie Posted January 25, 2006 Posted January 25, 2006 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.
john Posted January 25, 2006 Posted January 25, 2006 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.
john Posted January 25, 2006 Posted January 25, 2006 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)
Face-Man Posted January 25, 2006 Posted January 25, 2006 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.
plexer Posted January 25, 2006 Posted January 25, 2006 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
witch Posted January 27, 2006 Author Posted January 27, 2006 The school are paying for them but as I said, I dont have the clout to tell the boss where to buy the stuff from. To be honest, as long as I can get Dell to throw in the 4 year support, I think we will be happy with that. UNLESS someone knows of something really wonderful out there - I could try and persuade my boss again. Thank you everyone for your help - I will let you know what happens
fooby Posted January 27, 2006 Posted January 27, 2006 We have direct contacts to places like Novatech, so we can buy from there. We also have a college credit card, so we can buy from ebuyer directly, this has proven very useful. Our main supplier is a company called Cebec, our contact is Raj Vokketur and he has been brilliant. Any problems he is on the phone and his mobile! in fact he personally drives our servers down so they cannot get damaged in transit! This company is one of the best we have used so far, excellent customer service, warranty's are usually return to base (manufacturer warranty) as we have a few technicians here we can cope with fixing / building computers. They may even have techie's they could send out to assist with this sort of thing. Raj Vokketur at Cebec get hold of him on 08452 255059 or [email protected] This guy will go as far as he can to sort problems and queries you have, definitly recommended. fooby
Ric_ Posted January 27, 2006 Posted January 27, 2006 @ITWITCH: Maybe you could persuade a supplier to bring in a few demo units - the zero footprint Dell and HP for example. If you line them all up, you could compare build quality, size, wow factor, etc. Your management may prefer this to TCO analysis and tech specs - they probably value looks, noise level and desk space over money.
TechMonkey Posted January 27, 2006 Posted January 27, 2006 Ohhh the Dell small foot print are very, very nice, plus have a door you can add to the back to stop fiddling. If you get a certain monitor as well you can clip the PC box to the stand and it takes up no room at all, ohh! They are very much trying to push into Education so maybe you can get them to do you a great deal for some choice quotes or something
Norphy Posted January 27, 2006 Posted January 27, 2006 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) Strange. Until a debacle that we have with some interactive whiteboard setups, Stone were always very good for us. They always used high quality parts (Intel motherboards, aopen cases, Kingston RAM, Seagate hard drives). They were quick to replace any faulty parts and let us have a boot stock of hard drives. We did have a batch with those Fujitsu hard drives that forced Fujitsu to withdraw from the IDE hard drive business but they replaced them without fuss.
john Posted January 27, 2006 Posted January 27, 2006 Fuji Hard Drives were the small part, but as I said, they were great for swapping them out. My problem was the Intel Motherboards, they were just not good at all really at the time I used them (mine were P3 866s with 64MB ram)
mac_shinobi Posted January 29, 2006 Posted January 29, 2006 Probably cant do this but would be nice if you could opt for certain hardware parts like what hard drives you wanted and things like that because I was going to say the western digital raptors 10,000 RPM drives are really nice. I only have one 74 gig raptor and phew does it make a difference
E1uSiV3 Posted January 29, 2006 Posted January 29, 2006 I only have one 74 gig raptor and phew does it make a difference Makes a big difference to the price to tho sadly, and tey have a high pitched whine to them ( i had a pair of 36ers running striped, now that was fast) imagine a class of 30... lol
mac_shinobi Posted January 29, 2006 Posted January 29, 2006 Must just be the 36 gig versions that whine because my 74 gig is very silent !!
kingswood Posted January 29, 2006 Posted January 29, 2006 Dell are a pretty safe bet when it comes to purchases for schools- and the stuff they sell is also quite good. Someone mentioned HP- I like their kit, in fact I've been looking at their servers for some time now ready for purchasing a new one for curriculum. Even so, the past two servers have been from Dell and are really good value for money (with excellent support- so long as you don't go through county for it). @Shane: raptor hard drives in school systems? Not only the cost would be prohibitive, but also the noise! And no- we can't use them in the proxy server so you can play Doom!! lol! Paul ;-)
mac_shinobi Posted January 29, 2006 Posted January 29, 2006 lol - I dont have doom ( maybe doom 3 but even so ) I havent played any games lately , been looking forward to my ibook soooo much that I havent even thought about that Im looking forward to the expose ripple effects and x code , apple scripts and all the other billion things I could / can do on it Now hopefully MBNA pull there thumbs out there asses and send me the right "paper work" this time around. What noise are you talking about btw ? As I said earlier, it must just be the 36 gig versions that make noise cos my raptor is silent because they added new ball bearings or something new to the 74 gig versions !!! I agree with you on the cost factor though I was just giving the example , ok maybe a crud example but a one none the less
kingswood Posted January 29, 2006 Posted January 29, 2006 A room full of 10k rpm hard drives would be silent? Not even SCSI hard drives are *that* quiet! But in any case I jest. So- you haven't gotten your iBook then? Hehehehe...or your forms from MBNA? Ouch. Another two weeks for you then- lol! ;-)
john Posted January 29, 2006 Posted January 29, 2006 My 74GB is silent so must be the 36GB version that is noisey
mac_shinobi Posted January 29, 2006 Posted January 29, 2006 ok at least I know im not going crazy lol
john Posted January 29, 2006 Posted January 29, 2006 As for school servers, I am putting that or one of the new 150GB ones into a primary school shortly (feeling jellous yet??? )
kingswood Posted January 29, 2006 Posted January 29, 2006 I'd prefer the cavier RE2- with 400GB of storage and a speed of 7,200rpm (and with the addition of 16MB cache and Native Command Queuing) it would be a good addition to any server or high end workstation that needs some storage. I think the raptors are rated at somewhere between 32dBA when idle and 36dBA when active (don't quote me on that though), which is fairly good. I've actually heard people complain about the noise of these things- and that's with the bigger 74GB version. I suppose it's all relative to the hearer. I don't personally care. I need more space than that! lol! Paul
john Posted January 29, 2006 Posted January 29, 2006 True, I had sort of forgotten about that as it was launched rather quietly with the new raptor
mac_shinobi Posted January 29, 2006 Posted January 29, 2006 lol, god do I have the "Pick on me sign stuck to my forehead ?? " lol sheesh Im getting an ibook, you feeling jealous yet lol
kingswood Posted January 29, 2006 Posted January 29, 2006 No- I'm waiting for the rumoured 13.3 widescreen version with built-in iSight and Intel Solo Processor....667MHz bus speed and 2Mb cache...yum. Paul ;-)
mac_shinobi Posted January 29, 2006 Posted January 29, 2006 Thats why you use the 74 gig raptors ( especially if you have 2 of them in a RAID 1 configuration ( I think its RAID 1 lol ) and then you get the larger hard drives for your data and hook them up as extra drives. That way you still get the speed boost and also keeps your data on other drive(s) without the data being effected if you have to do a clean install As all of you already knew anyways lol
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