What New Desktops To Buy For An I.T Suite?

[irsprint84]

Bad example though as laptops are a whole different kettle of fish from standard PCs, Personally though, apart from a batch of celeron (eurgh) laptops that were bought 4 years ago any other laptops we've purchased in my time in this job has never not lasted the 4-5 years we want from them......that all comes down to the member of staff whos laptop it is.

 

Trying to get rid of staff laptops altogether, but it's proving difficult, luckily the head is semi behind us on it though

 

Sadly thats never going to happen because of the 'laptops4teachers' scheme it is now 'impossible to teach' without them, yay government schemes!

[john]

Sadly thats never going to happen because of the 'laptops4teachers' scheme it is now 'impossible to teach' without them, yay government schemes!

 

Ah yes that scheme We have managed to rid ourselves of it, but as soon as any sniff of money comes in for IT its ooooh we could get Laptops for Teachers again, and I go that's fine BUT who's paying for the replacement battery's after 2 years, to re-new the laptops after 3 years, all the broken screens from "it just cracked" moments etc... Then it usually goes quiet again as we cannot fund the laptops and IT rooms with our budgets, and most staff never use Laptops in school as we don't have a wifi at present and all rooms have a fixed PC so no need for them for teaching either, so no justification for having them other than they want to waste school funds on toys, next they will be wanting company cars as they are using there own cars to drive to and from work to home!

 

Anyway, back to Desktops.... I am using more and more refurbished PCs from John @ict-direct simply due to the great value of them and the support from John, I did purchase some i3 machines last year for our Dedicated Media Rooms and the year before high end Core2 machines for the small pilot media room, other than that I'm looking more and more at Refurbished PCs simply as a new PC with 3 year warranty is £450+ (from the big names), but I can get a refurb one with a high end spec for half that price and its got enough ram and CPU power for a good 3 years life within the school, so if it does us 3 years for £200 or so, yet we only get 5 years (on paper) on a £450+ New PC what is the point of getting them as we get better value from the refurb PCs.

 

I've nothing against building your own, however home brew machines in our place have no respect and no confidence in them as they simply didn't cut the mustard for our needs so we need a period of showing look this kit works and people respect brand names, its a disgrace that its that way but the rooms with big name kit in are looked after better by staff and students than the home-brew / generic PCs.

 

I do like the idea of open PC being panels etc that is a good idea however so something work thinking about for when I next get funding to completely re-design an IT room from scratch.

Edited June 1, 2011 by john

[localzuk]

Kinda of the same but I get machines that I know will last best example (Though laptops) before I was here they brought £300 HP laptops that lasted less that 2.5 years! brought some at £400 and they will definitely last 4-5 years easy. Its all about making the right choice as I thought about the purchase for many months.

 

£400 laptop lasting 4-5 years?! I spend around £500 - £700 per laptop here, and we get 4 years out of them if we're lucky. Anything cheaper than that and its got no chance! Also, people saying they have celerons that have lasted 4 years or more??? We've got core 2 duos which are far too slow now, so celeron that is still going must be increasing staff stress no-end, and reducing staff confidence in the IT provision.

[mrbios]

£400 laptop lasting 4-5 years?! I spend around £500 - £700 per laptop here, and we get 4 years out of them if we're lucky. Anything cheaper than that and its got no chance! Also, people saying they have celerons that have lasted 4 years or more??? We've got core 2 duos which are far too slow now, so celeron that is still going must be increasing staff stress no-end, and reducing staff confidence in the IT provision.

 

There is no such thing as a core2duo that is too slow for a school. Our learning support department has E2180s and 2GB ram, running windows 7 pro and imaged with all the software they require, they'll easily last another 2 years.

 

Too slow for a certain requirement i'd allow, but you can't expect me to believe that your entire school uses cpu intensive software?

 

We have Pentium 4 Ds which still hold there own on windows 7!

 

Do you have a scheduled weekly disk defrag on your PCs? scripts running to clean up the junk folders? etc etc, it's more likely that they're being filled with crap rather than the hardware not coping.

 

I've nothing against building your own, however home brew machines in our place have no respect and no confidence in them as they simply didn't cut the mustard for our needs so we need a period of showing look this kit works and people respect brand names, its a disgrace that its that way but the rooms with big name kit in are looked after better by staff and students than the home-brew / generic PCs.

 

What's the reason for the lack of respect or confidence in them? only about 4 members of staff here would even recognise the company name on the brand logo!

 

Buy all retail processors, 3 year warrentys per processor and you get an intel sticker with it....perfect, it's now branded as intel

Edited June 1, 2011 by mrbios

[john]

What's the reason for the lack of respect or confidence in them? only about 4 members of staff here would even recognise the company name on the brand logo!

 

Buy all retail processors, 3 year warrentys per processor and you get an intel sticker with it....perfect, it's now branded as intel

 

The kids and staff both have this love of brand names, bit like clothes really they all want Jack Wills tops (other tops available) the same goes for PCs they just don't respect kit unless its got HP slapped on it, plus the home brew kit we've had hasn't been that fit for purpose in recent times the SLT expect it to last forever yet the kit wasn't that reliable or powerful thus isn't lasting. As for stickers, thats one thing that doesn't last whatever make it is lol

[SYNACK]

@mrbios - we do buy i5s but as a primary school we buy stuff to last for ages and still be usable without a pile of compromises two thirds of the way through their actual lifespan. When you brought your Pentium Ds were they three revisions back too. As a comparison we still have 7 year old machines that can run Windows 7 reliably.

 

Your method of construction does interest me though and if we had ay large computer labs appointed like that (with space) I would totally look at something like this but would probably irritate you in my CPU choices. How does stuff like full screen encoding work on those CPUs for tutorial videos and the like as we had some i3s that choked on that. We also look at the power consumption figures for our gear closely to try and reduce the ammount of heat it puts out and by extention sound. The latest CPUs are just so efficient in comparison being able to use the same idle poser as an Atom chip but still spin up to decent levels of performance and with the right setup can even go passive cooling when idle under stock heat sinks.

 

As you say it is different per school but in our particular case we buy stuff to really last with good driver support so that even five or more years down the line they can still support the latest OS without having to rebuy what was otherwise a perfectly good machine.

 

What is your refersh cycle like on those builds out of interest, 3 years?

Edited June 2, 2011 by SYNACK

[Steve_T]

@mrbios where do you get your G620T motherboard bundle from, care to share the link?

[mrbios]

@mrbios - we do buy i5s but as a primary school we buy stuff to last for ages and still be usable without a pile of compromises two thirds of the way through their actual lifespan. When you brought your Pentium Ds were they three revisions back too. As a comparison we still have 7 year old machines that can run Windows 7 reliably.

 

Your method of construction does interest me though and if we had ay large computer labs appointed like that (with space) I would totally look at something like this but would probably irritate you in my CPU choices. How does stuff like full screen encoding work on those CPUs for tutorial videos and the like as we had some i3s that choked on that. We also look at the power consumption figures for our gear closely to try and reduce the ammount of heat it puts out and by extention sound. The latest CPUs are just so efficient in comparison being able to use the same idle poser as an Atom chip but still spin up to decent levels of performance and with the right setup can even go passive cooling when idle under stock heat sinks.

 

As you say it is different per school but in our particular case we buy stuff to really last with good driver support so that even five or more years down the line they can still support the latest OS without having to rebuy what was otherwise a perfectly good machine.

 

What is your refersh cycle like on those builds out of interest, 3 years?

 

5 Years refresh cycle.

 

The pentium Ds were actually a wrong choice when they were purchased and certainly not my choice! at the time of purchase the E2xxx range were cooler, used less power, the same price, and about twice/three times as fast, that was my managers fault though, had we bought the E2xxx chips they'd have likely lasted 5 years easily. That said they have lasted nearly 4 years, and the only reason they aren't lasting longer is due to a dodgy batch of foxconn motherboards where the electrolyte capacitors have started leaking (a problem which shouldn't happen again as they all use solid capacitors these days, also a problem that was likely to occour in prebuilt PCs - foxconn admitted the problem and sent us 50 new motherboards, again my managers fault for buying foxconn crap).

 

Good driver support is something i ensure when i buy, it's a prime reason i don't use AMD kit, as much as i like AMDs processors and prices the motherboards are poo

 

Infact one thing i notice is that the hard drive seems to cause more problems than the rest of the PC in the long haul, hopefully the 40GB SSDs should fix that Also most parts these days, so long as you buy retail and not oem, comes with warrantys from 1-5 years. We have a field on our asset register where we log the purchase date, order number and products on that order along with their warranty start and end date, that way when parts die we have an easy referral point.

 

I'd like to make it clear though that i'm not saying that i think what anyone else is doing is wrong, just that i get the impression that in some schools around the country money is needlessly wasted, though i can't say that for certain without knowing a ton of other things to do with that school, i'm more questioning peoples practices rather than accusing, as i know i can come off as a bit of a **** on this subject which i feel quite strongly about

 

@mrbios where do you get your G620T motherboard bundle from, care to share the link?

 

Will get that for you now, the prices on the links will be slightly different as we were given a few special prices

 

Memory: http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/components/memory-pc/ddr3-pc3-10666/1333mhz/ocz/ocz3g1333lv2g.html

Motherboard: http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/components/motherboards/miniitxmotherboards/asus/90-mibfb0-g0eay0dz.html

Processor: not currently on novatechs site, but a price we were given through a quote: £51.50 unit cost

SSD: Again not currently on novatechs site, but price given through quote: £63.90 unit cost

 

Quote works out about £225 per PC including the PSU, i'm hoping the SSD price might drop a bit before we order though as about a month ago it was £59 per unit.

 

So All in that's an Intel G620T 35w processor, Asus mini ITX motherboard, 4GB OCZ Memory, 40GB Intel 320 SSD, Corsair CX430W PSU.

 

Could make the build cheaper by getting £12 power supplies but i've lost kit due to shoddy cheap power supplies in the past so im not going to bother this time. I fully expect those PCs to last us 5 years as well, if you wanted to up the cost by £10 you could put a G850 in there which would be a lot faster (the G620T is 2.2ghz, the G850 is 2.9ghz) but obviously you lose the lower power/heat addition then.

Edited June 2, 2011 by mrbios

[mrbios]

oh i should also add that we're getting a G620T bundle (once they're available) and a G850 processor to fully test the setup prior to purchase, so i'll let you know how that goes

 

I'll be testing using Adobe CS5, Visual basic 2010, windows movie maker....i might even test adobe premiere elements and see how they fare on that, though i can't see that being fantastic

[localzuk]

There is no such thing as a core2duo that is too slow for a school. Our learning support department has E2180s and 2GB ram, running windows 7 pro and imaged with all the software they require, they'll easily last another 2 years.

 

Too slow for a certain requirement i'd allow, but you can't expect me to believe that your entire school uses cpu intensive software?

 

We have Pentium 4 Ds which still hold there own on windows 7!

 

Do you have a scheduled weekly disk defrag on your PCs? scripts running to clean up the junk folders? etc etc, it's more likely that they're being filled with crap rather than the hardware not coping.

 

All machines get used by everyone basically. We're a middle school, so there's no such thing as departmental pc's really. (We have about 25 of those across the entire school). We have some thin clients but people complain that they can't do everything that the fat clients can. And the fat clients get used to run all sorts, ranging from basic web browsing to animation software, video editing, photoshop etc... So, there definitely is such a thing as a core2duo which is too slow!

 

All machines get re-imaged termly, profdel set on them etc... so they're as speedy as they can be.

 

Celeron's just can't and don't cut the mustard.

[RTFM]

Don't think we do bad to pay around £340 for our pre-built machines. Thats with OS, 5 year RTB, 4gb Ram, 250gb HD, E5700 processor and custom branding on the cases........

 

They video edit in CS4 fine, a little slow but they certainly do the job!

[farquea]

i'm also with mrbios on this, since i worked here we have bought parts and built the systems ourselves or had them built up and delivered to us. I cant really see how it can be cost effective to go down the HP/Dell route etc, and i dont see a problem with the PC's being respected more if it has a Dell badge on. These new I.T computers we are going for, like mr bios are going to be locked away in cupboards underneath, although we will put them in a case so that they can easily be swapped in and out with a spare and like someone suggested we are looking at putting in those USB/Audio hubs into the desks to finish off the whole look and hopefully they won't get broken too easily but at about a tenner each we could afford to replace a few a year etc if we had to.

 

My main gripe at the moment is where to go with monitors. we currently have 17" dell 4:3 minotrs but finding it hard to justify buying some bigger newer widescreens as the current ones are perfectly fine for kids and it would end up with us scrapping about 30 perfectly good monitors, and i dont like to get rid of stuff unless it really isnt useful anymore!

[localzuk]

Monitors here don't get replaced until they're basically dead. A working LCD is a working LCD. School machines don't generally need giant screens, 17" is perfect for it. Our largest screens in general use are 19" widescreens, but that was due to the pricing available 2 years ago when they went in. Everywhere else we have 15" or 17".

 

Only monitors I actively replaced over the last 5 years, before they died, were CRT monitors.

[glennda]

Yup I would custom make mine but I purchase around 200 pa and don't have the time to make all those machines although I don't talk with HP/dell but the likes of stone/novatech / misco for custom builds.

 

This year for our new it suites we are looking at I5s with 4gb RAM 160gb hdd in a nice looking case

[TechMonkey]

@MrBios: Do you have many hardware problems & do you find chasing after manufacturers/suppliers much different to chasing a PC manufacturer?

[SYNACK]

@mrbios - I'm suprised at your driver issues with the AMD gear, we went all AMD for 5-6 years there because they had x64 support long before intel got off their lazy behinds and added it meaning that our AMD ones kept pace much better than the intel equivilents. To be fair most of these were hp so driver support was excellent however even the dirty custom builds had good support from Windows itself and we only really needed to find a couple of audio drivers. The main problems were cheap boards that garnered no support from anyone and intel kit like their dropkick integrated video stuff.

 

It all depends on which stuf you get at the start though and to a large extent the luck of the draw as to how the well manufacturer actually ends up supporting its products.

[mrbios]

@MrBios: Do you have many hardware problems & do you find chasing after manufacturers/suppliers much different to chasing a PC manufacturer?

 

No problems at all power supplies die occasionally as for a while we were purchasing the cheapest of the cheap, light as a feather ones but since we've started buying nice branded ones like corsair we've not had a problem there Plus there was only a one month warranty on the crappy PSUs, corsairs warranty service though is fantastic

 

We've found western digital and samsungs RMA service is fantastic for hard drives so no problems there, don't even need to speak to anyone, just a simple online automated service. I hope intels service is just as good, but now that we're about to start buying solid state drives hopefully they'll be pretty reliable (buying intel ones due to their proven SSD failure rate being a third of that of any other manufactuerer, i'll try and find the statistics report if i can though it was a few months ago)

 

As for motherboards/processors we generally go direct with novatech who support us quite well (i've got our accounts manager on MSN for instant access to support). We had to go direct to foxconn for the boards with faulty capacitors though, as they were out of warranty but clearly had a major design flaw.

 

@mrbios - I'm suprised at your driver issues with the AMD gear, we went all AMD for 5-6 years there because they had x64 support long before intel got off their lazy behinds and added it meaning that our AMD ones kept pace much better than the intel equivilents. To be fair most of these were hp so driver support was excellent however even the dirty custom builds had good support from Windows itself and we only really needed to find a couple of audio drivers. The main problems were cheap boards that garnered no support from anyone and intel kit like their dropkick integrated video stuff.

 

It all depends on which stuf you get at the start though and to a large extent the luck of the draw as to how the well manufacturer actually ends up supporting its products.

 

It's not so much an issue, more that they weren't much cop a while back so we went all intel, and now that we run an entirly intel school i don't want to faf about adding all the VIA chipset and ATI graphics drivers to WDS etc. Plus keeping to what we know as reliable in warranty terms.

 

We have 6 core phenoms in our media suite (9 PCs) we bought some decent motherboards for those rather than the cheap as chips ones but i don't feel as confident in there build and features as i do with most intel boards.

Edited June 2, 2011 by mrbios

[Hecate]

@Mr Bios: How do you cost your staff time for doing the builds

[mrbios]

@Mr Bios: How do you cost your staff time for doing the builds

 

Simple answer: we don't.

 

Personally i see school money in the way that £1 of money in a budget doesn't compare to £1 of staff time. Money saved in the budget is money well spent in staff time.

 

Replacing 62 machines this summer, goingto start building them in the next couple of weeks as and when people have free time to get it done.

[RTFM]

If your going to say 'building the machines ourselves is better value than buying pre-built' then you have to include the time it takes to build them in the equation?

 

Otherwise it's hardly a fair comparison as companies include a labour charge for pre-built machines, your excluding that even though it is taking up your / technicians time to put together the machines. Doesnt the old adage 'time is money' come into play?

 

I dont think you can simply say "£100 of our budget is the equivalent of 5 hours of my technicians time" but you have to take the building time into consideration imo.

[mrbios]

If your going to say 'building the machines ourselves is better value than buying pre-built' then you have to include the time it takes to build them in the equation?

 

Otherwise it's hardly a fair comparison as companies include a labour charge for pre-built machines, your excluding that even though it is taking up your / technicians time to put together the machines. Doesnt the old adage 'time is money' come into play?

 

I dont think you can simply say "£100 of our budget is the equivalent of 5 hours of my technicians time" but you have to take the building time into consideration imo.

 

We take it into consideration as far as "do we have time" to which the answer is "yes we do"

 

When we first started doing it it was risky, as we didn't have time, but now the whole school is deployed in the same way, with the same image on every pc in the school we have time. Over the past 5 years from when we started doing it this way up to now it was a case of make time, to make the pcs, to save money, and it's paid off Now we have time to do it without having to make time like we did in the beginning.

[RTFM]

Thats fair enough from a point of 'do we have time' and 'yes we do'. That's down to how you want to justify it.

 

From a direct comparison cost wise it's still not entirely accurate to not include labour in the sums.

 

Quick edit; A lot of schools might not be in the position to have the time from a staffing point of view, so for them i guess it is more cost effective to buy in pre-bought units. From that view point its quite dependant on number of staff, workload, etc etc

[mrbios]

Quick edit; A lot of schools might not be in the position to have the time from a staffing point of view, so for them i guess it is more cost effective to buy in pre-bought units. From that view point its quite dependant on number of staff, workload, etc etc

 

Very true, reading back i said in an earlier post that whether our method works depends on the school in question rather than it being a one glove fits all type solution.

 

But labor cost or no labour cost i think the question Hecate asked is an impossible one to answer, as i firmly believe that £ vs £ internal staff costs can't be compared with the labour costs of someone external.

 

PAT testing is one example to switch it around, we're now doing PAT testing internally, that's one job i firmly believe should be external as A. a large portion isn't even IT and B. It's far too time consuming. Whereas building PCs internally is the opposite, the labour costs added on to pre build PCs are far too costly for the time we can spend doing it in house. Each tasks needs to be evaluated depending on the school and task in question, and for us here this school and building PCs ourselves works, it saves money and we have time to do it, where as others may not, that said, i wonder how many simply don't want to do it themselves rather than simply not having the time?

[RTFM]

PAT testing is one example to switch it around, we're now doing PAT testing internally, that's one job i firmly believe should be external as A. a large portion isn't even IT and B. It's far too time consuming. Whereas building PCs internally is the opposite, the labour costs added on to pre build PCs are far too costly for the time we can spend doing it in house. Each tasks needs to be evaluated depending on the school and task in question, and for us here this school and building PCs ourselves works, it saves money and we have time to do it, where as others may not, that said, i wonder how many simply don't want to do it themselves rather than simply not having the time?

 

Regarding PAT testing, we have someone who works under the premises manager who does PAT testing and his contract is for 16 hours a week, however, I don't think external companies necessarily give value for money or a full service due to the fact they are in for, say 2 weeks in the Summer and thats it. At least with someone onsite if you get new machines or equipment in it can be PAT tested immediately rather than waiting for the external company to come back in.

 

We're quite lucky it isnt pushed onto the IT department I suppose.

 

£ vs £ internal staff costs can't be compared with the labour costs of someone external

 

Going back to the topic of pre-built machines Vs build in-house machines. What are your arguments for stuff like warranties. I know you have warranty on all your parts, but your technicians are responsible for fault diagnosis, taking the PC apart, sending the item back, fixing the PC when the new item comes etc. Compare this to us, for example, who have a 5 year RTB. It dies, we box it up and send it back, another is here next day in its place. Done.

 

I really don't think, value for money wise, we do badly with our pre-built machines. We get; E5700 processor, 4gb DDR3 Ram, 250gb HD, win7, 5 year NBD swap out and custom cases for £350 (give or take a little depending if we get anything special put in). Pre-built, we just image them and put them in place. Job done.

 

Clearly an hour of an internal technicians time isnt going to cost the same £ compared to what an external company would charge, but then some schools (mine for example) consider the technicians to be here to support the teaching and learning of the students as much as to build 100 new machines., if that means the teaching and learning is being negatively impacted to save a small(ish) amount of money, i don't know if all senior management team's would be happy with that.

 

That's a little more ambiguous but it does take into consideration what else a technician could be doing if not building all these machines. Again that is partly down to how many people in the team, responsibilities etc etc.

[mrbios]

Going back to the topic of pre-built machines Vs build in-house machines. What are your arguments for stuff like warranties. I know you have warranty on all your parts, but your technicians are responsible for fault diagnosis, taking the PC apart, sending the item back, fixing the PC when the new item comes etc. Compare this to us, for example, who have a 5 year RTB. It dies, we box it up and send it back, another is here next day in its place. Done.

 

I really don't think, value for money wise, we do badly with our pre-built machines. We get; E5700 processor, 4gb DDR3 Ram, 250gb HD, win7, 5 year NBD swap out and custom cases for £350 (give or take a little depending if we get anything special put in). Pre-built, we just image them and put them in place. Job done.

 

Clearly an hour of an internal technicians time isnt going to cost the same £ compared to what an external company would charge, but then some schools (mine for example) consider the technicians to be here to support the teaching and learning of the students as much as to build 100 new machines., if that means the teaching and learning is being negatively impacted to save a small(ish) amount of money, i don't know if all senior management team's would be happy with that.

 

That's a little more ambiguous but it does take into consideration what else a technician could be doing if not building all these machines. Again that is partly down to how many people in the team, responsibilities etc etc.

 

We have spare machines made up for instant replacements at all times, so staff and students learning is never negativly impacted by the time we spend building them, if we're building machins and staff or students need help we simply drop what we're doing to support them, if there machine has died we can simply swap it out there and then, change the name and location in AD then bring the old PC back to repair. When you repair as many machines as we have to here diagnosing the problems and fixing them isn't a long process by any means, most of us can spot a problem pretty quickly,.....99% of problems are resolved by replacing a power supply or hard drive or simply reimaging the machine.