Recommendations for new teacher workstations x30 32 or 64bit windows 7 for sims etc

[iPrimary]

Ah see I'm trying to be very frugal right now so I'm getting the hump with £40 extra for an SSD over HDD on custom builds! Adds up quite quick... £40 a unit over 10 units is nearly the cost of the monitors for those units... money that could be better used elsewhere.

 

With the SSDs most of the decent quality ones start at smallest 64GB (false economy buying anything other than Intel \ Crucial imo) Our images are only about 20GB so yes it seems a huge waste with PCs specced for 250 \ 500GB HDDs that are meant to be costing the earth... yet the manufacturers' suppliers are putting a premium on SSDs while retail can sell them significantly cheaper... someone must be getting palms greased somewhere to keep HDDs lingering on I reckon

 

Feels bizarre that PC prices were driven right down not so long ago yet gone flying back up when the only component that's hit a price increase is the one we all want to remove from the equation anyway!

 

Floods last year in Taiwan are to blame for that, hammered the prices of SSD's and HDD's - yet to recover.

[Tallwood_6]

Apparently only around a 3rd of SSDs are manufactured in thailand so prices where largely unaffected and if anything seem to have become more affordable in the last 6 months.

I would take a processor downgrade and get an SSD myself and the reliability is there for drives from intel, crucial and Samsung.

[Arthur]

Feels bizarre that PC prices were driven right down not so long ago yet gone flying back up when the only component that's hit a price increase is the one we all want to remove from the equation anyway!

Motherboards and RAM are both more expensive than they used to be. The former is due to increases in the cost of copper and Chinese labour, while the latter is due to Elpida going bankrupt. You can't blame it all on HDDs.

 

someone must be getting palms greased somewhere to keep HDDs lingering on I reckon

Unfotunately SSDs are still considered premium products. When you start seeing > 120GB SSDs in £300 Acer laptops I reckon the premium over HDDs will be far less.

 

hammered the prices of SSD's and HDD's

SSD prices did go up slightly after the floods in October, but this was more to do profiteering than anything else. Intel make thier SSDs in China, while Crucial make theirs in Singapore.

 

http://i.imgur.com/JK06I.png

[gshaw]

Unfotunately SSDs are still considered premium products. When you start seeing > 120GB SSDs in £300 Acer laptops I reckon the premium over HDDs will be far less.

 

This makes little sense when the price from online retailers is now in what I'd consider "cheap" territory... if they're selling for £50 for a 64MB M4 with associated warehouse, delivery etc costs someone is making a nice profit from the manufacturers \ supply chain to be charging £75+ for the same unit in larger quantities.

 

The other big PC cost increase is Microsoft's dirty trick with Windows 7 OEM licensing... whack another £20-30 per unit on for 7 Home Premium instead of Vista Home Basic... luckily we got the bulk of our machines in before the licensing change, which along with the HDD costs now looks a very wise move

 

I guess this is why I'm an IT geek rather than a City exec... I want the technology to move forward and hate seeing profiteering, which sadly is the name of the game in the business world...

Edited May 22, 2012 by gshaw

[andyturpie]

Viglen Ominino 4s - Came in cheaper than any other workstation we looked at - never looked back since.

[andyturpie]

PS it would be worthwhile buying workstations to be shipped with the cheapest OS available and use EES licencing for the upgrade - thats the cheapest way to do it.