Anyone trying to get rid of school computers?

[_Bat_]

This is more of a continuation of another thread found here:

 

http://www.edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=68871#68871

 

But it was taken slighty off topic and I thought it deserved a new one.

 

WITCH and myself have expressed concern over the age and therefore performance of a lot of computers in our respective schools, a lot of them are 300MHz and 600MHz with 128MB RAM. Sophos makes them run so slowly that it takes over 10 mins to log on sometimes, causing a lot of complains that I can do nothing about.

 

Is anyone trying to get rid of any computers in their own schools which are a better spec then these? I think both WITCH and myself would be very interested if you are within reasonable travelling distance of either of us due to collection reasons (WITCH is near Poole in Dorset and I am in Yardley, Birmingham). I'd be happy to arrange collection and the i'm sure the school would be happy to pay (though admittedly we don't have an awful lot of money left).

 

Thanks

 

James

[Geoff]

Unfortunately we aren't throwing machines out at the moment. What we're expecting to happen with our current old stock is that they will be converted to thin client terminals. We're implementing Citrix this year.

[nathan]

Dont think any of our schools are getting rid of any just yet, but i'll keep my ears open.

[krisd32]

if you'd of posted 2 months ago i was getting rid of 60 machines not very good spec mind but slightly better than yours! sent em down to first tech. i'd give them a call i'm sure they'd be able to sort something reasonable out!

 

Kris

 

p.s i think there phone no. is under our advertisers.

[_Bat_]

I've only just had the idea of asking to be honest, the other thread gave me the idea lol. I suspect I should have asked ages ago. We are getting a new ICT suite in very soon, I have just made their website, two servers have been replaced and all three hubs in the school are soon to be replaced with switches.

 

The only thing that is really an issue now is the classroom machines... they are going to be remaining as they are and they really run pretty badly. Teachers have gotten into the habit of coming into their classroom early just to turn their computer on so it will have booted by the time school starts, which makes me feel dreadful, but there is nothing I can do, I wish I could explain that to them easily.

[CheeseDog]

Not sure it will be of interest but..

 

I have 3-5 machines around the 600MHz 128MB mark. PM me if you want them.

 

(Without monitors)

[_Bat_]

Not sure it will be of interest but..

 

I have 3-5 machines around the 600MHz 128MB mark. PM me if you want them.

 

(Without monitors)

 

I think machines with that spec will probably just mean we will have more of what we already have, but thanks for the offer.

[eean]

Most of our ICT suite is P600 but upgraded to 256-320mb of RAM. The only thing they can't do is

-run the IWB (well they can, you just can't use the rubber).

-run photostory (they can but when you do the preview the voice is out of sync with the picture)

-photo editing (again they can, but it's a little slow with 3 megapixel pics so folks just reduce the size of the picture).

Logon time ~30 seconds (with roaming profiles) and they can do 640x480 short movie editing with no problem.

Half of the pcs are 1.2ghz ish and nobody has ever noticed which half of the room is slower. They run windows xp, office 2000 and McAfee antivirus + the all normal primary school cr**p. We've only just got rid of our p450s, and that was because we upgraded them rather than because people were complaing about their speed.

 

Not ideal, I know. And I am looking to replace them. But if you are really tight for cash see if you can pick up a load of old RAM and consider reconfiguring Sophos. A 10 minute logon would sound to me like another issue (DNS perhaps, heavy profiles - do a search on here for plenty of ideas, there is also a patch you can get for xpsp2 that takes 20 secs of the logon). I re-install them at least once a year, keeps them fresh. (I have an automated system, so it's easier).

[_Bat_]

Most of our ICT suite is P600 but upgraded to 256-320mb of RAM. The only thing they can't do is

-run the IWB (well they can, you just can't use the rubber).

-run photostory (they can but when you do the preview the voice is out of sync with the picture)

-photo editing (again they can, but it's a little slow with 3 megapixel pics so folks just reduce the size of the picture).

Logon time ~30 seconds (with roaming profiles) and they can do 640x480 short movie editing with no problem.

Half of the pcs are 1.2ghz ish and nobody has ever noticed which half of the room is slower. They run windows xp, office 2000 and McAfee antivirus + the all normal primary school cr**p. We've only just got rid of our p450s, and that was because we upgraded them rather than because people were complaing about their speed.

 

Not ideal, I know. And I am looking to replace them. But if you are really tight for cash see if you can pick up a load of old RAM and consider reconfiguring Sophos. A 10 minute logon would sound to me like another issue (DNS perhaps, heavy profiles - do a search on here for plenty of ideas, there is also a patch you can get for xpsp2 that takes 20 secs of the logon). I re-install them at least once a year, keeps them fresh. (I have an automated system, so it's easier).

 

I don't think it'd be worth spending money on the computers at all. They are Tiny computers and are several years over due for replacement. Some of the HDDs I discovered last week are only 3GB is size and I now have to keep deleting the local cache of the profiles as the HDD space gets so low that windows cannot run properly.

 

The slow down isn't caused by network problems, i'm fairly certain of that. They weren't anywhere near as slow until we had sophos enterprise manager installed. We have set them to only update from the server every three hours, but this makes little difference.

 

We have eight decent computers in the library (these are the only computers with windows XP, the rest run windows 2000). These eight computers log in just fine, with no delays at all. The management computers, which are on the same domain, are fine as well.

 

The ten mins to log on includes the time that the computer takes to boot, which is absolutely ages. I have looked into 1st technologies mentioned above and I might e-mail them and see what they have.

 

Whether we get new classroom computers or not, i'm going to make a new image for the classroom machines when the new ict suite comes it just to clean them all up a bit. If we don't end up getting new computers for the classrooms (tho I seriously hope we do) i'll divide the RAM from the old ICT Suite machines among them and hopefully get them all up to at least 256MB.

[tosca925]

We have around 16 800mhz 256 ram with 20gb hard drives sitting around doing nowt.

 

NOt sure if they are any good to you.

[CheeseDog]

Not sure it will be of interest but..

 

I have 3-5 machines around the 600MHz 128MB mark. PM me if you want them.

 

(Without monitors)

 

I think machines with that spec will probably just mean we will have more of what we already have, but thanks for the offer.

 

Thought you would say that.

 

Worth a try

[beeswax]

This has probably been suggested before, and if it hasn't the admins are probably hoping it won't be because of the extra work it may entail, but, would it be possible to have a section on Edugeek where schools can say what old stock they have?

[molesm]

Hi, don't have any spare machines but our 1.3 celrons were crawling aloing with Sophoos untill we turned on access scanning of on the C Drive

[Netman]

I *will* have up to 40 going spare in the summer - range from PIII 1 Ghz 256Mb to AMD Athlon 2200 (about 1200Mhz I think) 256/512Mb all min. 20Gb HDD mostly Compaq and a big pile of CRT's if you need 'em.

I have made the offer to WITCH before as I'm just up the road but these are better specs now... PM me if you're interested... we'd like to help...

[sidewinder]

We dont have a huge stock at the minute but we will be getting rid of a lot this year

I know for a fact theres definately 14-16 P4 1.5Ghz, 256MB RAM, 20GB HD machines going before the summer

And there is an indefinate number of 1.7Ghz P4, 256MB DDR, 30/40GB HD machines going once upgrades start after the new budgets are out

 

Didnt really think about offering stuff on here before, but we always have machines of that spec coming out (we just got rid of 16) They do often go to local primary schools but there will only be so many they want

 

I will make another post when we have some definate stuff. Would be no charge except people would have to pick them up.

My school is near Reading

[_Bat_]

Okay just thought i'd update. Ideally we needed the computers ASAP (as ours are dying a slow death) so I thuoght i'd look into First Tech as mentioned by krisd32 above.

 

I sent them an e-mail and they actually provided me with what I consider to be an extremely decent offer:

 

HP/Compaq Evo

Pentium 4 1.7 GHz

512MB RAM

30GB HDD

CD Drive

XP Pro COA License

Warranty of 12 months

Keyboard & Mouse

 

Cost: £80

 

As we are ordering 14, the total cost is £1,120 (ex VAT). Not bad at all in my opinion. If these machines work out, i'll certainly be remembering this company in the future.

 

Thanks for all the offers we received on this thread.

[ChrisH]

Its all good gear from them. Me and Ric get stuff of them all the time. I also live close enough to be able to go and look exactly what they have in at the time.

It certainly makes my budget go alot further. My other favorite items of them are HP mono laser printers.

[_Bat_]

Hehe, what makes the offer seem especially good is that a couple of years ago I could have gone into PC World and bought one top of the range machine for £1100 (they might even sell some computers for that price now, who knows) ... now i'm getting 14 for a similar total cost. They may not be as high spec'd, but they are certainly good enough for our needs. I certainly wouldn't refuse a computer with that spec for that price at home.

[krisd32]

First tech are good for things like this, i find my self in there quite often. brilliant prices also, hte amount of stuff they get in is phonomenal.

I think the ones i sent down there are in romania now!

 

Cheers

 

Kris

[LCWS]

Blatent spam removed! - Ric_