Whole room for £4500 - possible?

[a_d_atkinson]

My school is currently working it's way out of a massive deficit and spending in ICT has been practically non existent.

 

We have two full time ICT suites. One runs P4s and XP and jsut about meets our needs. The other is over 10 years old and is running Celeron 300s with 64Mb Ram and Win 98. The room is getting to be impossible to teach in, certainly any multimedia is out of the question.

 

Through some donations and other funding we have got together £4500 for ICT equipment and I'm trying to see if I can stretch it to replace the Win98 room. Currently I can just about make it by building the boxes myself.

 

Has anyone got any other ideas for some cheap boxes? Spec needs to be:

 

17" Wide TFT

Decent processor

1Gb Ram

No optical drive

circa 80Gb HD

 

Cheers for your help

 

Forgot to mention I'm looking for 22 machines.

Edited December 15, 2008 by a_d_atkinson

[SimpleSi]

Try ICT Direct for some 2nd Hand kit - you'll have money left over

 

regards

 

Simon

[somabc]

Try ICT Direct for some 2nd Hand kit - you'll have money left over

 

regards

 

Simon

 

Yes the dc7100 (£119) or dc7600 (£145) would certainly do you for basic net/office/multimedia. They have monitors for £40, keyboard & mouse no more than £5.

 

Total = 22*(145+40+5) = £4,180 + VAT/DEL

 

Remember you will need a network cable for each machine as well if you do not have any spare.

[powdarrmonkey]

Yep it can be done, I'd go with the HP machines. Speak nicely to Insight and get yourself some 17" Viewsonic TFTs (VA1703b I think) at £90, network patch leads at £0.35 and a Netgear switch or two, and you should be well on the way.

[dhicks]

Has anyone got any other ideas for some cheap boxes? Forgot to mention I'm looking for 22 machines.

 

Buy a couple of cheap quad-core Dell servers. £800 each (you'll need ones with two PCI card slots). You'll need another £200 or so each for Windows Server and device CALs.

 

Four NComputing cards (£300 X 4)

X550ProductPage

 

That leaves you £60 each for screen, keyboard, mouse sets. We got second-hand screens with built-in USB hubs for £30 each (you'll be lucky to find widescreen ones for that, though). £10 for a cheap keyboard and mouse set leaves you £20 or so per machine for stuff like USB cables and hubs if needed.

 

--

David Hicks

[dhicks]

Speak nicely to Insight and get yourself some 17" Viewsonic TFTs (VA1703b I think) at £90

 

You could go for the 22" widescreens - only a few pounds more.

 

--

David Hicks

[powdarrmonkey]

Oh I was assuming 30 machines. You should have cash to spare then

[dgsmith]

I feel for you. We currently have ~25 spare P4 machines (1.7ghz, 256MB, 20GB) that we probably will be disposing of/donating/bulk selling cheaply. The last machine we had to be less than this spec was disposed of over 2 years ago!

 

I work out your budget to be around £205 each, which for a monitor too isn't too much. With regards to "widescreen", I don't think you can afford to be picky on such a stretched budget, so as others have mentioned, getting some from ict-direct for £40 would be the best bet (£65 for 17" - maybe cheaper for bulk purchase)?

That still gives you £135 per machine. You'll be pushed getting a new machine for that. Personally in your position i'd get all 2nd user equipment (ict-direct again for example), which will bring your spec up to an acceptable one and tie you over for the short term.

[Butuz]

I know exactly how you feel mate! 2006 budget - £50k, 2007 was £6.5k, 2008 worked out about £2.5k

 

All the hard work I've put in over the last 7 years is basically being undone due to finances.

 

Butuz

[Bezwick]

If you can sort it out quick, you could get your TFT's ready

 

MISCO SAVER 17 WIDE TFT - Misco.co.uk

[CyberNerd]

why not convert the machines to thin clients and spend the cash on TC servers

[Bezwick]

Another alternative could be buy a powerful Terminal Server for around £3000, install thinstation on your existing machines. The buy a Decent PC, with Whiteboard, Projector and Speakers for the teacher. That way you could get pretty fast clients for next to nothing, and If you need to display multimedia stuff the teacher can do it on their screen.

We have a classroom with a similar setup to this which has 22 thin clients running of a Dell server and most of the staff & kids think its their favorite classroom as its one of the fastest.

Also once you have one terminal server you could probably setup another 10-20 thin clients all over the school with little impact on performance.

 

Just an idea

[FN-GM]

Another alternative could be buy a powerful Terminal Server for around £3000, install thinstation on your existing machines. The buy a Decent PC, with Whiteboard, Projector and Speakers for the teacher. That way you could get pretty fast clients for next to nothing, and If you need to display multimedia stuff the teacher can do it on their screen.

We have a classroom with a similar setup to this which has 22 thin clients running of a Dell server and most of the staff & kids think its their favorite classroom as its one of the fastest.

Also once you have one terminal server you could probably setup another 10-20 thin clients all over the school with little impact on performance.

 

Just an idea

 

You can get the server cheaper than that. Don't forget about licenses

[Ric_]

I'd have to agree with Bezwick... thin clients are the way to go in this situation. You will drag yourself up to an acceptable standard and spend very little. Of course I'm a fan of sustainable computing and I'm quite passionate about the use of thin clients.

 

If you have a chat with Andy Trevor at the Cutter Project (see Cutter - a better way to deliver computing ) he will help you out. I think you have just missed out on the latest 'matching grant' offer from Sun but if you can wait a little you will be able to get a 'buy one get one free' on the server to give yourself some redundancy and I would recommend trying to go down the SGD route.

[ChrisP]

remember that some chipsets dont like putting out widescreen resolutions (eg. 1440x900)

Also to stick to 5:4 for the teachers PC if you are connecting to an IWB

[Bezwick]

I know, but that was including the licences and we use branded Dell kit with 4 hour response. So yep you probably could get on cheaper than that, but think he would be better off spending that bit more as he will have "all his eggs in one basket so to speak". Hence £3K for the system, i suppose if he wanted to he could get two cheaper ones and load balance them, then if one fails the use the other until its repaired.

It personaly choice really, We prefer a very powerful and reliable single server that is well looked after, than two cheaper ones that aren't as powerful and possibly less reliable. However we have 5 other PC suites that use standard clients so if the terminal server classroom goes down its annoying but not the end of the world.

 

You can get the server cheaper than that. Don't forget about licenses

[tech_guy]

I know exactly how you feel mate! 2006 budget - £50k, 2007 was £6.5k, 2008 worked out about £2.5k

 

All the hard work I've put in over the last 7 years is basically being undone due to finances.

 

Butuz

 

Same here; our budget the last two years has been consumables only...

 

Edited December 16, 2008 by tech_guy

[FN-GM]

I know, but that was including the licences and we use branded Dell kit with 4 hour response. So yep you probably could get on cheaper than that, but think he would be better off spending that bit more as he will have "all his eggs in one basket so to speak". Hence £3K for the system, i suppose if he wanted to he could get two cheaper ones and load balance them, then if one fails the use the other until its repaired.

It personaly choice really, We prefer a very powerful and reliable single server that is well looked after, than two cheaper ones that aren't as powerful and possibly less reliable. However we have 5 other PC suites that use standard clients so if the terminal server classroom goes down its annoying but not the end of the world.

 

A few months ago we got a server with this spec

 

Dell Poweredge 1900

2 x Quad Core

8GB Ram

Raid 5 120GB

3 Year 4 hour warrenty

£1500

 

That just suied us for a TS

[a_d_atkinson]

Thanks for all the replies folks. Thin client sounds like a plan but we're a bit short on manpower for getting the whole system setup.

 

I reckon second user is probably the best bet. Hopefully once we're out of the deficit spending will go back to normal again.

 

Re: monitors. I've got no preference for them being wide or 5:4. It was jsut all that seemed available when looking at new systems.

 

Cheers

[featured_spectre]

I did a whole room with £5000 (albeit that everything was 2nd hand). The PC's were not bad spec, and came from an Academy not too far from me. We managed to get 2.8Ghz CPU, 1GB ram, 80GB hdd, and 128MB GFX cards in the machines. More than adequate.

[FN-GM]

Also a note with monitors, widescreen and larger screens, they take up more room that your standard 17" than you think.

[Ric_]

Thanks for all the replies folks. Thin client sounds like a plan but we're a bit short on manpower for getting the whole system setup.

 

I reckon second user is probably the best bet. Hopefully once we're out of the deficit spending will go back to normal again.

 

If you are short of manpower, thin client is the way to go.... much, much easier to manage.

 

If you simply don't like the idea of thin clients - some people just don't trust them for some reason - ICT Direct is your friend. John Graham will source you anything... hell, he'll even sell you a server for your thin client setup!

[Bezwick]

Just gone back and checked my Purchase order, same spec as yours, same server even except we have 16Gig instead of 8Gig and yeah your right it was less than i remembered £2000, but then you need licences on top of that.

 

A few months ago we got a server with this spec

 

Dell Poweredge 1900

2 x Quad Core

8GB Ram

Raid 5 120GB

3 Year 4 hour warrenty

£1500

 

That just suied us for a TS

[a_d_atkinson]

If you are short of manpower, thin client is the way to go.... much, much easier to manage.

 

If you simply don't like the idea of thin clients - some people just don't trust them for some reason - ICT Direct is your friend. John Graham will source you anything... hell, he'll even sell you a server for your thin client setup!

 

To be honest we've got a funny arrangement. Previous HoD was in charge of techie and teaching side of technology and after his retirement it's left my (ICT HoD) and two technicians. Strictly speaking nobody is in charge of the techie side!

 

I've not looked into thin client at all to be honest but from a quick read up it sounds great and would suit our needs in terms of expanding. Much more chance of upgrading the servers every few years rather than a whole suit of machines.

 

Where can I go for an absolute numpties guide to setting the system up and what I need?

[Ric_]

Where can I go for an absolute numpties guide to setting the system up and what I need?

 

EduGeek is your friend... see the links section at A guide to thin client computing