Require new PCs

[british_government]

We are have dumped stone and gone with Dell due to the following.

 

• 
  
• The Pro Support offered by Dell is excellent
  
• The Design, everything is small, fits on the stand, lots of monitor choices etc
  
• People will be on site the next day for repairs
  
• If you get a continuing hardware issue they will replace with brand new
  
• You can get exact parts with repairs, for example the motherboard will be the same on a repair 4 years after the order
  
• The computers they offer are available for a long period of time, for example we ordered hundreds of Optiplex 790 over a few years and nothing had changed in them. Others change the motherboards etc
  
• The ability to manage the BIOS using SCCM
  
• Update BIOS via SCCM if need be.
  
• All the old kit matches the newer stuff, they don’t change the design often. so the majority of our kit is identical but different models. For example the Optiplex 780, 790 & 7010 are all identical looks wise.
  
• The matching monitor, keyboard & mouse.
  
• All machine as standard support dual output display
  
• The PC and monitor requires 1 power cable
  
• The stand really tidies cables up.
  
• Full support with imaging, include all WinPE drivers
  

 

Just to get in and support stone here, although we aren't exclusive to them.

 

Stone unistand, everything fits together on pretty much any monitor you want, cable management is good

We have a 5 year next day on site warranty on all our stone desktops, coming with 3 years as standard this is a very small price difference

After a 3rd visit on the same piece of hardware it is replaced (so on the 4th)

Impressed with exact parts, its rare for this not to happen but a pain when it doesn't!

I would agree for evolution and improvement over time? Or at least a price drop if you are buying old hardware

All Intel boards, I havent looked at these sccm features, but we can do a lot with the BIOS on a 1-1 basis.

All the Stone desktops look the same too, only difference may be different versions of their unistand, but thats evolving and getting better.

Why wouldn't you have matching kit?

Dual display is ncie! We buy super small form factor as small as you can get machines, which obviously dont have this, and would be wasted on 99% of machines anyway.

Y power cable

Full driver disk, never had any issues imaging with MDT and latest drivers are always available from stone, admittedly not as easily as the Dell website.

 

Thinking about it I know I said Stone support is good we did have a batch of 100 Stones which wouldn't always recognise the keyboard. Stones answer; for me to update every BIOS myself, which didn't actually fix the problem. That alone put me off them.

 

Just one question on this, why would you apply a fix to 100 machiens without testing it first?

[pmdc199]

I don't buy machines with less than 5 year warranty, they're normally good for that amount of time. Any less is too expensive on the rolling replacement, and in these halcyon days of good-enough-computing, a 5 year machine is still perfectly workable. Stick an SSD in and a Core2Duo with 2GB RAM is all most people actually need.

 

I agree money wise but would you keep them in a main ICT suite for 5 years or roll them to other parts of the school after 3 years for example.

[Guest Guest]

Just one question on this, why would you apply a fix to 100 machiens without testing it first?

 

I didn't, but since the problem was intermittent I had to apply it to a half class set to test it. It seemed to help so I then had to apply it to the further 85 PCs. The problem was never fully solved.

 

My point was there was no offer from Stone to come and help me apply the BIOS updates. If I'm having to put up with such basic problems I may as well go with Bobs corner shop computers.

Edited November 14, 2012 by Guest