Slashdot Mirror
Rolling Your Own Business Desktops?
mike asks: "I'm mulling the logic of my company building its own desktop computers. As the IT Manager (plus sysadmin, janitor...) of a struggling-yet-thankfully-still-alive dotcom, money is really tight. We have around sixty ~400MHz desktops which are increasingly showing their age. Acceptable P4 systems from the big guys run at least $1000. By recycling the OS (Win2k), case, cdrom, floppy, and K/V/M, I figure I can assemble a good AMD system for about $600. That's a 40% savings. Is it worth it? The cost difference could very well determine whether this project proceeds or gets put on the back-burner again."
"Some negatives about rolling my own:
- Management: I won't get the special business features offered by some manufacturers. Dell's OpenImage, for example, looks awfully nice. But how much does that really buy me in a company of 60 machines? I don't use such stuff now; am I missing out on nirvana?
- Time to build: Even though we'd leverage Ghost wherever possible, handmade systems nevertheless take time to build, load, & configure.
- Supporting different platforms: Because money is so tight, I can at best afford a capital replacement rate of 25%-33% (15-20 units) per year. That means I'm committing to the support of 3 or 4 different platforms. Having just one platform is great, but how many companies, even ones that actively strive for it, truly enjoy that luxury? I inherited two platforms (Micron & Gateway); support isn't that bad. With proper planning, I don't see why we can't support four.
- Hardware quality: How much can I trust a popular Athlon chipset in a business environment? I feel silly bringing this up because I have a few Athlon systems at home, each with a different chipset, and they've been nothing but rock solid. But I know the lack of a really good chipset has been a large contributor to why AMD's aren't more prevalent in the business world. (well, that and long term bullying by Intel).
- I don't get a proven, prepackaged system that works right out of the box.
- Cost savings. Plain & simple.
- Increased horsepower per dollar spent.
- By choosing my own equipment (mobo especially), I suffer fewer OEM shortcuts.
- I have to admit that I'd enjoy the pure geek satisfaction of rolling out 'my' creation to the company.
For those that are curious, Ask Slashdot did an article on the AMD issue, here.
I see it this way. You are the one that will be working on these machines. You must factor in the knowlege that you made them and know what is in them. Just make sure you get a warranty on all the parts since you will not have one on the entire machine
Maintaining all of them would give you plenty of job security.
Will Microsoft even allow you to recycle your Win2k license on a new computer?
...but Microsoft might be. You might want to take a look at the EULA from M$ and see if they allow the transfer of operating system. Not that I'm suggesting you follow that load of malarky, but it may be a consideration.
Personally, if they're just office type machines. Get Star Office and Linux and see what you can do. Experiment with a couple of your users to see how much trouble it might be.
I really don't see a downside to the project... if you had a few people you trusted to help upgrade the systems, you could assembly line the upgrade and get things up and running in a couple weekends. The only things that I would see as a concern would be the age of power supplies, hard drives, etc. But if you do regular backups, that risk is minimized.
I wish there was a choice that said "Factually Wrong -1" when I mod.
If, two months from now, one of them dies and dies hard, you're on your own to figure out what went wrong, find a replacement part, try to get warranty service from wherever you bought that component, etc.
Most of the majors offer very good service. Often it's just a cross-ship for the whole system, and you're in business the next day with no time invested by your IT department.
Those that actually need them?
I mean really suzy in the phone center has no need for over 400 mhz, I'm striving along just fine on my 667.
Don't forget having to run your own assembly and tech support shop as well. I can usually coerce somebody to come out from Dell and replace my broken (video card, motherboard, CD-ROM drive) with little effort here at work if the need arises and it's covered under warranty. At your shop, YOU are the warranty guy.
Also, factor in the labor costs (which will be substantial), count the amount of time it will take for you to assemble a machine, the cost of ESD straps and mats (you will be using ESD mats, right?), the time it will take to set up an assembly area, and the space that will take up, etc.
I used to build machines for other people (family members, etc.) Now I just tell them all to buy a Dell because the hassle on me to maintain them is WAAAAAY less. The only machine I build myself anymore is my personal box, because I spec out stuff that is too high-end for a manufacturer like Dell anyway.
What's your salary/the salary of the people that will have to build 60 boxes? How long will it take? Are you sure $600 + labor costs + no manufacturer support will be less than $1,000? If not, there's no business case to do it yourself.
-matt
depends on what your time costs the company. If you are willing to eat the extra hours to build the systems then yes you can save a lot of money. In this economy the extra hours put in to save your job might very well be worth it. YMMV but everytime I have done this the first couple of boxes have taken a long time then once I had working with the hardware being used down the time to build went down a lot. I would not worry about support you are most likely better than anything Dell could provide.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Don't buy more processor than you need; It's expensive. You can always upgrade the CPU later if you pick a good platform. You can do the whole thing for about $450-$500 for each box.
Incidentally, I picked the GF2MX because it has good drivers and VERY fast 2D. If you are doing cad or something, get something from matrox, they have a much better DAC. The 3D is just icing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One thing you've got to look at is warranty coverage and who will support these boxes once they're made. Most of these components will have warranties, but there's different coverage for each one you'd have to keep track of, you might get a bad batch if you order in bulk, which can cost time and money in the long run. For a business environment, even small business, I'd recommend looking to a solid company that has a good service record and see if you can get a bid war going between two companies who have small business plans to have your business. Bottom line, it's probably more hassle than you'd want.
Use RIS.
You won't be tied to hardware configs (unless you have funky hardware that doesn't have a Microsoft driver) and you can just plug your machines in with a floppy telling the machine to RIS itself (or certain NIC cards.. was it newer 3coms or Intels?).
There are some things that are not fun about doing this, like popping older apps in to MSI's (something I have had difficulty doing), but it pays off in the end.
Will the receptionist who plays Solitaire all day need a new machine.... consider that there are probably only a few folks that would need the upgrade.
Well I can talk from some kind of experience.. we had a bit of a botched attempt at trying this one year and decided never to bother again.
:
:-)
Someone had the great idea to buy a load of AMD K6's and some cheap generic 'all in one' motherboards.. our team of 8 or so techies all sat and built about 30 of this machines in an afternoon or two.. but the machines are pretty stubborn and are already very very out of date - we just used old cases complete with 2GB drives which were more than enough at the time. Now the CPU's are still quick enough for office tasks, but the drives are much to small.. and its too much hassle to go around adding new drives and re-imaging.
I think buying complete systems is the best way to go about this for a number of reasons
a) Standardised hardware (makes imaging a lot easier)
b) Probably more reliable (you know the hardware combination they give you IS going to work.. sometimes you can put together a troublesome combination of parts and never get the system working right)
c) Having someone else to blame if the system gives you hassle.. (just call their tech support and get them out to fix it!)
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
i did the same thing you are thinking about doing now. I think the man-hours involved with building the machines ends up costing mre than buying complete machines. It depends on the amound of machines. We had 30 to build. All identical, so we just applied the same image to all of them. the long part was building them. In the end we would have saved money and time if we had simply ordered them.
Perhaps you should consider Walmart's Microtel PCs without Windows. Assuming you don't need software or monitors, you can get a 1GHz Celeron for $400. The trick is the legallity of transfering your Windows licenses (Which piece of the original computer does the license go with, the hard drive? Can you swap that piece into the new system). [Of course, if you could convert to Linux, that would be cool, but that's probably a separate battle.]
There are a few advantages of building the computers yourself, but it's not something I would do in your shoes.
Consider first the labor costs. Even assuming you can ghost your software and buy exact matching hardware, you're still looking at 2-3 hours per machine in the actual hardware construction/testing phase. Depending on what you could be making billing out to clients (again, depends on what kind of business your in, and your position in the company), you may loose your cost savings.
Second is system hardware management. You know for a fact that a solid system from Dell or another giant will most likely have every component working together and all the neccescary drivers functioning right out of the box. Most of the time off the shelf components play nice these days, but you never know.
And, of course, there is the licensing issues. If you plan on migrating your current software licenses to the new machines, make sure they all work ok.
Just a few things to think about.
The Internet is generally stupid
If you must, go out and get some low-end consumer PCs and buy a bunch of spares: it's less work than building your own and still very cheap.
Speaking as someone who has to support about five hundred of Some Other Guy's Product(tm), the main issue I'd have with us rolling out so many of our own custom built systems is just that. Systems from some other guy (say, Dell) come with pretty comprehensive service plans that lets me make Dell deal with dead monitor/mouse/HD/power supply problems in 24 hours instead of me having to track down the manufacturer and get him to ship me a replacement within a couple weeks time. :)
If you're already supporting the systems, though, as you make it seem... then this may not be an issue for you. Just find out about RMA policies of your vendor beforehand!
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
I don't know where you are getting $600/system but I can get a 1ghz duron system complete with no scavenging for less than that. I would think w/o software that you could get about $400/system if you really skimmed.
----------
while (alive) { Work(); PayTaxes(); Eat(); Sleep(); }
Bool
While I can appreciate the geek factor here, I think you'd be nuts to roll your own systems here. It will eat up loads of your time, overall costing your company more than it would to just pay more for each system. And I'm not just talking build time. When (not if) one of the systems go kerput, you'll end up diagnosing it yourself, RMAing the defective component, replacing it yourself, testing, reloading OS (if needed), etc etc. Compare to getting a Dell or something, where you determine software or hardware. If hardware, it's under warranty, you don't have to so much as crack the case open. Saves a lot of time and therefore cash.
Even if they cost a little more, I think you'll find yourself grateful for a warranty to fall back on. Plus, when machines go boom, you aren't instantly blamed. If you roll your own, any system that crashes will be pinned on YOU, and you alone.
I know that's not a situation that I'd like to be in. Would you?
End of lesson. You may press the button.
It depends what you need them for. I'm not sure where you get the $600 per unit quote from, but assuming you recycle most of the things, I'd say $300 a unit is likely sufficient.
For simple office work, a $50 Duron and something like a $100 moderate quality motherboard should suffice, throw in a $100 hard drive to increase speed, maybe add 128 megs of ram for a little boost too, without topping $300
For 3-d or crazy amounts of compiling, you can probably upgrade to a 1.6ghz Athlon XP and a new hard drive as well as DDR RAM for under $500.
What I would do is build a couple dual Athlon linux servers and compile code on them while doing development and small compiles locally on the current 400mhz machines, but it depends on your application.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Also I know the name may be tainted, but I cannot stress the quality of E-Machines. If your tech staff knows a bit about hardware, their horrible tech support is not an issue. We have about 50-60 E-Machines here, and only 2 or 3 have ever gave us a problem. These PC's are insanley priced and the components are name brand. You can a 1Ghz+ machine for under $800 with a monitor if you look around.
Remember these big guys buy in bulk that is why they offer good prices. Plus most of the time the PC is ready to go (as long as it comes with the OS you want which you can customize with Dell.)
Why is 400mhz so bad for desktop systems ? What are your users' needs ? Must every system be upgraded to a 'blazing' Ghz+ processor ?
Cobbling together parts saves cash initially, but what about technical support and part replacement ? Do you call each vendor for each component when something fails ? How do you prove you bought the part and deserve support ?
Example: buy an OEM system - say, a Dell, and you call them when anything breaks that came in the box. Hard drive, keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc. Are you now going to keep track of Viewsonic, Maxtor, Microsoft (periphs), Xircom, Intel, 3com, Logitech, Samsung, Sony, etc etc etc! support contracts ??
So basically I'm curious as to two things -
Why the need for a processor upgrade across the board, which is what I'm understanding this to be ? You're keeping everything else from the original systems, right ?
Do you have a system to manage proving you deserve support to a dozen vendors ? Will you no longer have support from the original OEMs who built the systems you're canabalizing ?
__
...and I can't really recommend it.
I worked in a 50-user shop, and provided services and equipment to a 200-user shop under contract.
In our case, the only way to get decent specs and meet the client's budget was to roll our own. The other options were too few systems, or systems too cheesy to contemplate. Cheesy as in crap, not as in creamy goodness.
If you go down that path, my suggestion would be to make sure you have confidence in your component choices, and that all your component choices interoperate flawlessly. Any system you have to see again will blow the savings - your first callback or return could be fatal. Make sure you source quality components, and if you're trying to minimize the number of discrete configurations, buy all your components at once.
Spend money on decent cases with good power supplies. Don't yield to the urge to "cheap out" on components that "don't matter" - they all matter. Don't buy cadillac parts, but make sure everything you do buy is good quality, sound, and durable. Keep extra original parts on hand, especially a mobo or two.
Come up with a logo and have the stickers printed - it amazed us how many people would readily accept a brand they'd never heard of, but would never accept an unbranded system.
Your initial problem will be evaluating a number of different hardware options, then settling on those you want to standardize on. Once you get to that point, what do you do with the bastard love children of your prototype period? Don't deploy them to users, you'll water down any faith and confidence your production systems should inspire.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
With all the issues with the VIA K7 chipset, it's natural you'd feel a little queasy about going the AMD route. Also there's the heat death issues to consider. I understand there are now safety measures in place to save an Athlon XP if the chip fan/heatsink fails, but that was not the case with earlier Athlons. But keep that fan on tight...it's important.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Honestly, with the possibility of needing more storage (I'm guessing that 400mhz systems probably had what? 10 gigs or so?) I don't see what problem you have. These are office machines, not servers whose load increases each week. Even then, these not only meet the minimum requirements for win2k (Which, btw, I think is a bad choice), but should be spiffy enough that no one dies of terminal annoyance using them.
Am I missing something? Are these software development systems (where compile times have alot to do with productivity) or maybe web design/graphic arts systems (where someone is bitching for the latest Macromedia tool) ? You've given absolutely zero compelling reasons for such a massive upgrade, with you willingly admit that you are on a shoestring budget. It's a wonder that your dotcom isn't dead like the rest.
If something in an OEM machine breaks, you can be assured that they can get you something to replace it. If you made it yourself and it's been a while (>6 months) there's a good chance the entire component you need is no longer available.
:)
So you put something else in it. Next week something else breaks. A couple weeks later another one. Now you already have four different setups, and the ones with replaced parts will give you trouble if you put a GHOST image back on them. Not to mention the hassle when you have to install new applications or drivers.
I personally prefer the OEM workstations with lots of stuff integrated: video, sound, controllers, NIC with lots of features. And you can be assured these machines will be tested when some ISV who's software you use (Microsoft?) brings out a patch or update. If you have self-made Athlon boxes sitting on all your desktops, what are you going to do when some crucial piece of software doesn't work? Blame the guy who sold you the 60 Athlons?
Bang for the buck is always a great exercise to play, but how about maximum buck?
Why $600 per machine? Why not.. $400?
Worst case you've got a power supply, motherboard, CPU, and ram. Everything else (peripheral cards, video cards, networking cards, sound cards, monitor) stay the same.
Best case, you can reuse the power supply.
Go for 800-900 MHz, rather than 1.4GHz.
Go for 266DDR, rather than 500+
So you spend about $60 on a CPU, you spend about $110 on the motherboard, you spend about $180 on 512mb RAM... that's $350...
How much performance do you need, how much performance can you afford, and how much performance can you settle for?
GPL Deconstructed
My experience has been that when you're too busy to handle your own hardware/software support, you should find a competent local firm who can build machines to your specifications, support them, and provide warranties.
I have found that name-brand systems (i.e. Dell, Gateway, Compaq, etc.) are overpriced, underfeatured, and have a very limited hardware upgrade path.
When you find a local computer reseller who will provide you with the support you need you can get the AMD systems you want with the componentry you want, without the hassle of taking the time to order, build, and load them.
This arrangment is especially valuable if any of your hardware is DOA. The vendor will take care of any returns. You only get working hardware.
Finding a competent local vendor is tough. Everyone thinks they know their hardware and their hardware is the best. It pays to go with someone who has been in business at least a couple years. Talk to their customers and get feedback. Check out ResellerRatings.com for comments on some of the larger resellers.
Good luck.
I see you already have a Pro/Con list. Here's a few more thinmgs to consider:
;)
DIY Rollout:
Pros:
You know exactly what parts are, or are not, in your systems, and can (usually) get spares easily.
OS installation/options/configuration is(are) also a known quantity.
Can be extremely cost effective to roll out.
Cons:
Warrenty is provided by whoever you bought your parts from (new), or long-past dead on recycled parts (in most cases).
Tech support? Look in the mirror!
Large Scale network support? See above.
There are a few good reasons for a DIY rollout, but the long term support may be the price you pay later. If you have confidence in your skills, and have a friend or two that can help you out when "it" hits the fan on the next "I Love You" type virus hits, I'd say, Save The Cash, and Go For It!
If your Boss (the guy signing the cheques) want "Guarantees", you just might have to talk to a Big Name company.
Here's a thought: Try selling off your older componants. The extra revenue, however small, might be enought to help get things rolling.
Good Luck eigther way!
You could pull off $600 in savings if you did it right -- I just replaced the CPU & motherboard in a 266 mhz box, kept all the peripherals (although I did buy newer, faster RAM), total cost was $325.
But anyway, you think you'll get $400 in savings per machine. OK, how much do you make an hour (on average, if you're salaried)? Let's say you make $40/hour, roughly. OK, so if it takes you 10 extra hours to custom-build the box, then you break even. Because you'll have to do without a support contract -- which I find is rarely used, anyway -- you may want to factor in cost for that, too. OK, so let's say you'll spend 3 hours, on average, servicing each machine yourself. So if you can put together the box in less than 7 hours, it's a savings. But it's really a good savings only if you can custom assemble those boxes in something like 2 or 3 hours. Then the numbers start to show promise. If you save $100/machine, that's $2,000 a year on 20 machines. So-so.
I guess for me, if I could replace the machines for $400 in parts, that's a $600 savings. If I then could assemble the thing in just 2 hours, that's roughly $100 of "savings" that I lose. That's 20 machines/year X $500 = $10,000. Yeah, that starts to sound worth it. If I was your manager and you came to me suggesting this big plan which would save the company $2,000 a year but suck up a lot of your time, I'd say no, let's have you spend your time doing other things that might have more bang for the buck. But if you come to me with a plan to save $10,000, and you are demonstrably capable of pulling it off, it starts to sound like it might be time well-spent.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
I would guess a change of CPU is "not an upgrade" but a completely new machine in the mind of M$. Perhaps that's why Intel put that damn serial number on their CPU's...so M$ could track how you moved their software around and get you for more "pay per use".
If you buy a machinefrom a ``real company'', you get support. If a hard drive breaks, Dell will forward-ship you one overnight. If your AMD system breaks...um...you'll have some guy breathing down your neck while you hope CDW has some spares in stock.
In a corporate setting, there's simply no reason to roll your own systems.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
(Note: I don't work for Dell, but after buying this latest round of systems, I wholeheartedly recommend them.)
;)
I got two Celeron 1.1GHz systems and a Pentium IV 1.6GHz for $588 each (shipped!) Here is a Slashdot post that details my experiences with them.
There was absolutely no way I could undercut Dell on price by building my own -- especially not when you include the cost of Windows XP (preinstalled), one-year on-site warranty, and the awesome cases that open with the press of a button.
It really doesn't make sense to build PC's yourself anymore when manufacturers are offering PC's like this for bargain-bin prices. Plus, you can always recycle monitors as well -- that's what I did with this set.
Building your own will certainly give you job security (as someone else mentioned), but it will also give you no end of headaches. Why doesn't video card A work with motherboard B? And installing Windows 60 times is enough to make even the bravest person run away in fear. Even with a copy of Ghost in hand, you still have the daunting task of putting everything together (and charging the company for your effort). In the end, it's really not worth it to either you or the company. Besides, do you really want to spend the next two weeks testing out RAM and hard drives by hand? Bleh.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Rather than buying from Dell/Compaq/HP...
You might want to consider what a local computer assembler would charge you for a generic PC with equivalent specs. Around here, at least (SF Bay Area) there are a number of mom-and-pop shops that consistently beat the large manufacturers on price. It's helpful to have someone local to call for repairs, too.
Also, a lot of these places will do the upgrading labor for you (and test/warranty the machines, as well).
-Mark
We have about 50-60 E-Machines here, and only 2 or 3 have ever gave us a problem. These PC's are insanley[sic] priced and the components are name brand.
Here are potential points of failure on an eMachines:
Strictly, the last is not a point of failure, but more an annoyance that is easily remedied.
My suggestion: if you go the eMachines route, replace the boot hard drive right away with a boxed Maxtor and use the Samsung as a slave data drive. Also get a spare Sparkle SFX-L form-factor power supply for each machine...the power supply WILL DIE. I guarantee it. Maybe not this week, maybe not this month, maybe even not this year, but IT WILL HAPPEN.
Also I strongly suggest using the expansion slots to replace the video with something that doesn't suck memory and processor cycles. You can still find decent PCI video cards.
Do this and you will avoid most of the eMachines' endemic problems. It's better to build from scratch, but if you must buy a box with a name, you can do worse (cough*HP Pavilion*cough) than eMachines.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
If you know where to get stuff, it can be cheap. Definately check Pricewatch for your stuff. You'll even get discounts on shipping if you buy in bulk from most places!
I've learned a few important lessons from having set up networks of white boxes. The little problems you have setting up your home gaming box just aren't acceptable when multiplied by 60...
- Buy good RAM. I've never had a problem with the Crucial stuff before, and have had problems with just about everything else. Bad RAM can cause intermittent failures, disk corruption, and a heck of a lot of wasted time.
- Buy a mainboard from a reputable manufacturer with a solid chipset. Don't buy anything cutting edge, get something that is stable and proven to work. Normally I go with one of the more mainstream Asus boards.
- Buy retail boxed CPUs. In my experience, the brand-x bundled coolers WILL FAIL within a year or two. Even the supposed high-end ones. The boxed CPUs don't cost any more when you factor in the fan cost. The retail boxed CPUs come with a 3 year warranty from AMD.
Chances are, the cases for the 400mhz machines don't come with the 300 watt power supplies that are necessary to run an Athlon.
Yes, if you can keep sufficient staff to handle the workload, and remember you'll need some space to do the work.
But I've always found it better to use clones, and the more control we had over the design, the better. The real savings come from being able to set up all your systems consistently so that you can manage them more effectively. You might have to deal with a variety of hardware (video cards and NICs are hard to stay consistent with, they change every six months or so), but you can account for that.
Using brand name systems, even if you stick with one brand, involves extra work, because they change so often now. You always end up managing a heterogeneous environment that was designed by a marketing department. And desktop PC's are so disposable that any extra warranty you'd get on a brand name is going to cost you more than it's worth. Much easier to just replace a hard disk than to ship a PC out for service.
Your biggest cost is staff, so if you use the opportunity effectviely, you'll make everybody's job easier, and the hardware savings won't even matter. It will also shorten your lead times if you set it up right.
Also, be careful that you don't over-use spare parts, thats' one problem with having a lot of new hardware hanging around. My motto is, "If we have too many spares, we'll use them." Sometimes you swap out a hard disk, throw the old one in the "we'll test it someday" pile. But if it turns out that wasn't the porblem, then you've pretty much throw away a hard disk without realizing it.
- You can get a reasonable deal from a Dell or IBM for 50 PCs. This includes putting your own image on the drive, support, a decent salesdroid who will likely help with any issues down the road, a sturdy warrenty to back your purchase up, lotsa help in the drivers & spares market, etc.
- You can get 50 PCs assembled at ye local screwdriver shoppe for about what it would cost you to build-your-own but insofar as support & such you are own your own (unless it is some gross defect they can return to the manufacturer.)
- Or you can do it all in house and assume you've got the time to do it all, keep up with everything, and of course document it all in case of a proverbial bus hitting you.
My own argument would be if the business is a real business it should invest in its tools that are a critical part of it's operation. If this eats into the other budgets tough - employees need a roof, lighting, and decent computers. Trying to nickel & dime on hardware is foolish because you invariably end up with a herd of increasingly quirky systems slowly becoming Frankensteined. Unless the tech support (you) is free they're going to end up spending any savings in your time as well as the downtime of the aging & rebuilt systems plus the increasingly irate rest of the staff.Put this all on paper, generate some good estimates of costs & time allowences, failure rates & resolution times then present it to the CFO. Even for a company in a cash crunch these are generally compelling arguments that are well understood by the numbers folks.
They they don't bite then ask yourself if you want to hang around babysitting these monstrosities as the rest of the world moves on?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I would buy from a trusted local store. You might end up spending a bit more, but at least you can go exchange a component without having to worry about S&H and delays.
You mention ghost. There's also Partition Magic's drive image program. There's also using any of the free cd-rom imaging programs to make an image of the final install. Slap that image on a harddrive and since you'll have the case open anyway, just put that hd in as a slave and copy the image over. There's a few things you can do since you'll have the case apart.
One thing you are factoring in is your time. You will be using it to do these upgrades. You know what you are paid and you know how long it will take you to do the upgrade. You do the math. 2 hours a machine can easily shave a hundred bucks off the price difference.
Yes, your time is a sunk cost for the company, but your time is valuable and could be spent on other projects which must now go without you.
Plus you've got the added cost of ordering multiple parts from different vendors, tracking these parts as they come in, etc.
I'm not saying you won't be able to save money, but be aware that there are these hidden costs as well.
Your company name, address, phone number, and you and your manager's contact info. We will be glad to assist you in any licensing issues you may have, especially in the area of OEM licenses. Glad to be of assistance.
Sincerely,
The Business Software Alliance
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Though you'll save $400 per box, the noise that all those AMD-powered boxes will generate may not be worth the savings.
I'm not sure how they do it but Dell boxes are extremely quiet.
I own and operate a small dotcom like business and we always bought the bits for our machines, and built them ourselves.
:-) Get someone else to burn it in - it's a waste of your time.
We bought the best components, big cases and were able to ensure everything worked as desired. But reliability is a BIG issue.
We recently stopped this practice and decided to buy from a small but reliable company (armari.co.uk). I bought a test machine (dual amd 1800+, 1GBram, etc.) and the build quality is amazing...we are now purchasing these machines (plus dual monitor) for all the team.
It's a big relief knowing that I can just call someone and have it fixed asap. Armari even provided named Win2k login, partioned the way I like, and system rescue CD's that in 10 minutes put the os, drivers and configs all back to factory ship.
No looking back to the dim and dark days of spending hours trying to get a SCSI card to boot a CD
to give me all the ~400MHz mobos left. They make great firewalls. ;-)
As I am sure many people will mention, a simple way to look at it is as a question of how much your time is worth. If it takes you 6 hours more to setup each custom built machine than a prepackaged machine, then is your time worth $67/hour to the company? You also have to compare this down the line. When a machine's hard disk, etc. dies, is a quick call to the box maker easier than spending time dealing with the drive manufacturer?
Of course it isn't quite that simple. This last point used to be a big reason for me not to build my own machines. Flaky CD, noisy hard disk, sticking keyboard? Call Dell and a new one will show up tomorrow morning. However, in the last year or so Dell's service has gone to crap, so now I spend an hour on the phone with them to get a dead CD drive replaced. When the cheapest CD drive at newegg is $29 shipped, it is more cost effective for me to buy a new drive than deal with Dell.
There is also the issue of finding a company that will build the machine you want. I want to spend $1300 on a dual athlon. I can't get that from any of the big box companies, and the smaller companies often have markups too large for me to swallow, or don't quite offer what I want. I am sure I could work with many of them to get just what I want, but by the time I have done that I could have chosen the pieces I want from newegg, mwave, gogocity, etc. 1-2 hours of my time to put the pieces together is worth $50-100, it isn't worth $500.
I find the balance tends to go in cycles. For a time I can build boxes better and cheaper than I can buy them ready made, and then for a while I can get what I want ready made for only a trivial markup. The combination of being in the "I can't get what I want" and the decline in customer service I have experienced recently unfortunately puts me in the building boxes phase.
Of course this only applies for boxes I care about and will have to support. Any box that even if I helped buy, I don't have to support, I just order ready made. That way if something goes wrong I just shrug and tell the user to call Dell, or whoever.
You also might look at the no OS boxes from Wal-mart. there is an article at NewsForge about setting Linux up on one. Spending $450 (including upgrading the memory) to get a 1Ghz Duron all put together isn't bad. Just wipe the commercial OS from the drive of the old machine, and install it on the new machine.
I'd say that the best and least expensive option is doing nothing.
Seriously, unless your line of business requires you to run heavy duty applications, there's no good reason that your 400 MHz machines won't do just fine.
Are you sure that "showing their age" is not merely a symptom that could easily be cured by either upgrading your network or adding some memory to those old systems?
On a personal basis, I've been seduced by the low costs and good performance of the recent hardware, but like many others, I found out that implementing a solution like that chews up far too much of my time. [I can't tell you how I hate to have learned that reseating memory modules sometimes makes a difference!] In the future, I'd rather go with an almost turnkey system made by a manufacturer with a reputation for reliability. My time is too expensive to do anything else.
Now you may have enough systems that you can recover your time investment: eg, you find out that the power supplies on those cheap cases go out and give weird symptoms that you learn to recognize. Time to fix problem first time: 2 days. Time to fix problem second time: 2 hours. Time to fix problem third and nth times: 20 minutes.
Shoot, if the systems you have are old and common, you might be able to pickup some backup reserves for parts or hot replacement systems for next to nothing.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I used to work for a shop of about 50 computers. We considered all options when we needed upgrades and new computers. In the end, we determined that a $600 Celeron Toshiba desktop machine was better than trying to roll our own and have compatibility and quality problems. However, we determined that rolling our own servers was VASTLY cheaper than trying to buy them. We went with straight Intel, right down to the motherboard, which was the most stable at the time. Built 3 new servers in just a few days. Most of the components had already been through a burn-in test, but I put them through my own anyway. Last I heard the fileserver had been up for > 365 days, and it was Win2k machine. If you do decide to roll your own, make sure you've got some extra equipment to replace dead stuff. Memory, motherboards, processors, etc. Then you can stand to wait that extra 2 weeks to get the replacement parts, because you are just waiting for replacements for you spares. In our 50 person shop, we always had a machine or two lying aside that could be swapped in for a problem child at a moment's notice. That allowed the users to maximze productivity while I diagnosed the problem on my own time and/or waited for a replacement. Roaming profiles and a good backend setup allowed a virtually seamless swap of machines.
I wouldn't be so sure that it is legal to recycle the Win2K license. It's most likely a license "for distribution with a new computer only".
Time to build: Even though we'd leverage Ghost wherever possible, handmade systems nevertheless take time to build, load, & configure.
Yes. But make damned sure that you're building them as an assembly line. The principle is that building a second one will only take 50% more effort than building the first; the third will take only 33% more effort than the other two, etc. Whatever old Henry Ford's theorem was. It works.
Set aside a room where no one else will bother you. *GOOD STATIC CONTROL* is mandatory. Do all stages of assembly at once, that way you're not wasting time fumbling back and forth for screwdrivers. Get going at a good clip with quality cases, and you should be able to assemble 100 systems/day - but that assumes you have *everything* where you need it when you need it, there's good padded shelving, and you've got a grunt taking care of taking cases out of boxes for you. It also excludes software load.
Just make sure you get a warranty on all the parts since you will not have one on the entire machineAbsolutely. But, assuming a competent builder (ie. not blowing processors with bad jumper settings or blowing boards by not having them seated right), the parts themselves should be pretty reliable. If you're buying good stuff, the biggest source of problems will probably be static handling.
Keep in mind that a modern memory or processor chip has literally millions of CMOS transistors. CMOS transistors have an incredibly thin layer of glass between the gate input and the source-drain circuit. A voltage applied to the gate influences the flow of current through the source-drain circuit. Trick is, the layer of glass involved is so thin that you can punch a hole in it with 30V. Next trick is that static electricity generates kilovolts (thousands of volts) with sufficient current to blow holes in the gate layer, but be imperceptible to you.
All it takes is one transistor out of the millions inside a modern chip to be defective and the computer will crash apparently at random... you know, when Windows VMM writes a 0 to a memory address and gets it back as a 1 later on... BSoD. Kernel Panic. Choose your flavor.
Wrist straps, static baggies, conductive floors, grounded workstations are *crucial*. Dell, Compaq, Asus and Abit spend millions of $$ on these things, and for similar reliability, you should demand the same standards every step of the way for your home-rolled machines. Make sure your computer store hasn't "helped" you by opening the static baggies. Write that one into the contract with the computer store. And make sure that the hard disk drives are still in their packing "egg-crate" things. You really don't want a box with a stack of hard disk drives. (Western Digital had a great video on hard drive handling floating around the 'Net, you should view it if you're building en masse.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
The major problem is post-install maintenance. If you know your way around troubleshooting a PC then it isn't a big issue, though. The only catch is keeping track of warranties.
To do that yuo need a big database project and the ability to track eahc individual item (since you'll likely buy a few dozen parts at a time, instead of one huge buy).
To take care of that problem, here's what I do: I ignore the warranty past the first 90 days. If it fails in that time then I'll bother to get a replacement. If it fails a year later, then it isn't worth my time to pursue the issue - my time alone is worth more to the company for two hours of work than a single CPU, motherboard, HD, etc.
So you need to decide up front what you are going to do in the post install world before you install.
As a side note, for my corporate workers, I build celeron 1GHz machines - $75 each for the mobo and chip, a GOOD case and a few fans for $50, 128MB for $30 or so, and a $65 HD (10G - everything usefull is on network). They don't need high performance (well, most of them), and network speed actually affects more of what they do that just about anything else I can do with their system.
-Adam
I think I'm missing some critical component of your question but what exactly makes a 400MHz P2 system slow with Windows 2k and why exactly do you need new systems? Upgrading is great and all but do you REALLY think you need to at this point? I've got Win XP running on a K6-2 with gobs of RAM and it runs great it has a slow hard drive which makes app loading a tad on the slow side in some cases but most of the time it doesn't appear much slower than my Athlon XP 1700 (in anything not dreadfully processor dependant). For most things I wouldn't consider these systems slow unless you're doing heavy graphics work or doing a lot of compiling or plain number crunching.
If you insist on upgrades a good strategy is to stagger the upgrades spreading the process out over a longer period of time. Grab a couple new systems and get them integrated and slowly but surely phase out the older P2 systems. If possible recycle them to take the place of more specialized systems like file servers, firewalls, domain controllers and the like. If you stagger the upgrades you eventually get more for your money because of continued development and you have time to build or merely integrate all of your systems. Getting five workstations meshing with your network is much simpler than getting 50 meshing all at the same time. If you're building them you'll definitely appriciate not trying to do it all at once.
Instead of building them grab refurb units from the major vendors, considering the number of high power systems purchased in the past couple years you can end up with a speedy system for a pretty good price. It makes ghosting a single drive image a bit more difficult than having a homogenous system but it saves you a bit of time. Besides how expensive is it to buy a pack of CD-Rs to burn images for particular families of systems? Some organizational elbow grease and this process is not too difficult. I like color coding systems to make it easy for tech monkies to find the right CD to image a system with. It's lowtech but it works. One color for the manufacturer and a second color for a particular model or family. Just organize your CD images by color and it works fine usually.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
We (I) just replaced the 15 workstations in my small office here with these. Gateways. P4 1.2's. 20 GB HD's. 128 MB of mem. $600. Even comes with a monitor ($70 less without). XP Pro installed, so no windows licensing issues. And your supporting all those artists, dude!
Th
For example, $360 for a 1.6 GHz P4 w/ 3 year on-site service.
They're putting dimes in the hole in my head to see the change in me.
My 1.4 Tbird at home runs a "cool" 60-64 C with the case off, a fan sucking air off the board, a 1.5Ghz+ rated CPU fan and Arctic Silver 3 compound spread like butter between the chip and fan.
No way I'd use AMD on a at work machine stuck inside some box that'll be beneath someone's desk being used as a footrest.
Let's say I have a business with several dozen computers. I have "illegal"/reused copies of Windows on all of them. Who cares?
What is Microsoft going to do to me? How would they even find out? Why are people scared of this?
In my opinion, do as much as you like with Windows installations, up until your conscious tells you maybe it's time to give Microsoft some $ credit.
I wouldn't touch this one with a ten foot pole.
Something is going to go wrong during the installation (bad parts, weird software issues, etc.)
If managment is not demanding it I would steer very clear of this bottom end stuff. You will be married to it for the rest of your tenure with the company (and possibly afterwords).
I once did a DSL install for a retailer on the cheap. Using a low end computer that he had around I concted a video kiosk of sorts. Of course, the thing never worked like it should, and it reflected badly on me.
Isn't your job hard enough, that you should leave the OEM business to the OEMs?
This is something I've never understood.
I'll give Dell the benefit of the doubt on pricing here and guesstimate that you're paying a $100 premium over "do-it-yourself" for the Dell brand.
Does that brand give you anything? Really? $100 times 60 users = $6000 premium for a warranty.
If you're talking disaster recovery, then maybe there's value to saying "Mr. Dell, a fire wiped out my shop. All my PCs are belong to burnt toast. Give me 60 PCs tomorrow."
Of course, in the event of that kind of a disaster, the 60 PCs won't do you much good.
Will your much-vaunted Dell warranty restore the data on a dead drive? No. So it can't be for that, either.
Given the probability of an individual component failing among 60 PCs on any given day, I'd just buy two spare machines and sit 'em on a shelf, "just in case". I'd then buy one replacement hard drive for every hard drive that failed. And I'd have a stock of two or three heat-sink fans.
Barring a lightning strike that took out 10 PCs at once, I think I could offer my 60 employees better (as in "in 5 minutes, just by walking down the hall") onsite replacement service than Dell, and I could do it for $1000, not $100 * 60 = $6000.
When building your own systems you have a number of advantages. It took my boss a few months to learn them after buying some shit hardware from a "professional PC builder"
Advantages:
1) Good hardware in each system, you don't have to deal with low-end entry-level shit motherboards that are unstable and will be the leading cause of crashes.
2) Easier to upgrade. Sure, you can buy an OEM system from HP, Dell, IBM, or wherever... but in two years, when you want to upgrade.... you have to buy an entirely new box instead of just upgrading the motherboard, cpu, and ram.
3) Easier to fix. Sure, OEM's offer supposedly "good" support and will come onsite to fix it. But usually you are stuck mailing off your system to a factor somewhere for hardware replacement. This is just not an option when the hard drive contains sensitive business information.
Since we moved to building our own systems here at my office, we've had increased reliability and performance... we've also seen a drop in the time spent dealing with bad hardware.
If you have qualified people that know PC hardware or you yourself are qualified... then go for it, there is no reason not to.
x
Ever need an online dictionary?
If I owned the company and was paying you salary, sure, I'd go for it. Free Labor for all. Need more incentive? I've got a roll of stock to hand out.
Seriously, in a shop your size, it's a good short term solution, but hard to pull off long term. Dell, IBM, Compaq and the ilk have an advantage that they spec out thier Mobo's exactly. They can have a single driver install that works for 100 models of computer.
Back in the days I did break fix I came across too many systems that people have put together that were hard to support. You'd get odd errors, but nothing would ever check out as bad no matter how you tested it.
The worst problem was no system was like another. You'd go to a desk. Windows is iritiating itself to support. Let alone trying to figure out what's inside with out cracking the case. With a big name you look at the front of box.
You might want to see if you can go somewhere down the middle. First, call around to several business electronic resellers. Tell them how many manchines you're looking for, and what ballpark range price you want. Also let them know you're calling around to several vendors. Sometimes you can find bargins. In Particular these days in the Cel 1Ghz area. Which is more than 2x than your currect crop of computer. Companies like insight and CDW. Might not hurt to check out the likes of TigerDirect.
If that fails, local IT shops might be able to puts something together for you. The fact that you're looking at 15+ machines means you can most likely deal. Your support costs may not be all that lower, but there is a chance you'll be able to get a replacement part quicker. At the very least you'll save time over having to do it yourself.
Last resort is doing it all yourself. Sure at home, you don't want no stink'n pre-built. Specially a consumer one from a retail store. But at work you have...well...work, and it's doubtful you have the work bench to setup 15 computers at one like an asembly line.
. . .
Which piece of the original computer does the license go with, the hard drive?
I can answer that first one straight up : MS licenses software according to a complete configuration, usually specified according to model number.
Moreover, as I understand it, if Dell or whoever change *any* component specification, they have to seek a *new* license _every_ time this results in a materially different *system*. I understand that system is defined as mobo + processor, disks and ram et.c. don't have any effect. The system system (are you with me? :) is not mutually exclusive with the model number system of licensing - both seem to have simultaneous effect.
How do I know this?
Well a year or so back, I ordered up a bunch of IBM "M Pro" dual PIII/i840 machines for my company. Firstly, IBM were sharp enough to take our cash (yup that's cash by direct transfer to their account) stating they had shippable product. Rubbish. Weeks later we were still being fobbed off. So at that point I called the legal department at their regional HQ and pointed that they had a material breach of contract and had better sharpen up. We got our boxes pretty darn quick. But with NT4 loaded instead of Win2k. (we'd ordered W2k)
In trying to fix our fulfillment problems I had a direct line to their assembly/engineering management, so this info is near as dang it from the horses mouth. IBM couldn't just switch us a new license for Win2k. Moreover, once an OEM license is accepted by the end user (like when you power up and configure :) , you're bound by the same OEM terms. You are *supposed* to keep the base system.
Yup that sucks. FYI IBM set us up with a bunch of nice SCSI 18Gb 10k drives by way of apology, and the machines are rock solid, service since then good et.c. It was an interesting education.
As far as the real world goes - not that I advocate this - how exactly is MS going to be able to tell you replaced the whole underlying System?
If that made any sense to you, I guess it's a result! I'm too tired to unravel the rest of the gobbledygook that was pumped into my mind when I got irate and pressed for answers why I couldn't just get IBM to hand us the licenses we originally ordered.
Good luck to ya, hope the BSA doesn't catch you at anything you shouldn't be doing:-0
Does MS alow that in their EULA...... I would read it very carefully...
You could ofcourse use something free. won't save you much right now (since you already have an OS, or assuming it is allowed) but it will save you a lot of maintenance and thus time that you could use to build more than just 25% to 33%
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
...that can and will go horribly wrong.
After doing my own independent upgrading with friends' and friends' friends' computers, I can tell you one thing: if you make it or change it in any way, you will be RESPONSIBLE for it. The owner of the computer/s will expect service from you as soon as you can find you.
Every little change that happens to their computer? Remember, that's your fault. Why their floppy disk drive scans itself before shutdown (even if it did before you upgraded the computer), you may not know, but you better do something about it before the computer blows up! Believe me, there are times where they will hunt you down because a year after you installed that motherboard in their system a year ago, their computer now is "doing something that it didn't before"...you know, like when they open up a "cool attachment" from their relatives in the email program that they're just beginning to learn and the computer crashes because the person who wrote the program couldn't tell the difference between a divide by zero error and his own ass. Anyway, anything that happens to the computer is because you changed it in some way, hence, you're responsible for it.
It may seem like an extremely fun project to reach for, but realize that the managers are GOING TO HOLD YOU PERSONALLY ACCOUNTABLE for everything that goes wrong and for nothing that goes right. It's a road not even worth a million bucks to take.
We thought building our own would be cheaper, but the maintenance turned out to be a nightmare and cost us a lot more than the machines themselves. In once case, we had a machine that had a bad motherboard, then a bad replacement. Took almost 3 weeks to get that one machine up and running.
Dell is great. They'll come out and fix your machines for you. After the build our own fiasco, we went with Dell. The only problem we had of all the Dell machines was a bad IDE cable in one machine. Otherwise, things were great.
I bet you'll average more than $400 in labor time, for each machine, in the long run. Also, I think your math is bad. I bet you can get decent Dell P4s for $600 or so. A Dell, 128MB P4@1.7GhZ(without monitor), $500 after rebate.
I've got 350 machines and done it both ways. Been through this. It sounds good, but in my opinion, it just ain't worth it. Here's why:
Add up not just what you make an hour, but what your company pays to keep you around, including overhead. Most places you can double your wage. That's what you 'really' cost. Less? OK. Point still holds. We're buying perfectly servicable machines with giga wazoo drives and gigahz processors sans monitors (which have not broken) for between $700-$800 with a three year warranty. It breaks, they ship us a new one or repair it on site. Period. Your parts are costing $600. You're going to have to make money on a hundred dollar margin. That spread is too thin. You've got to manage the parts, store them, and get everything working quickly. That's a lot of prep time. Even if you managed to break even on paper, couldn't you be doing something more useful for the company? I know it's fun (I used to put together computers with nothing but a swiss army knife at trade shows), but you're supposed to be out there making a million dollars. Put your energy where it can be leveraged. --Just my opinion.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Also, I'd be surprised if you really need to upgrade all your PC's. 400 mhz is still a pretty good box by most standards. And you needn't upgrade to the highest-end Athlon stuff except for maybe a few of the most power-hungry users (CAD, image rendering, etc). For most typical office applications, 400 mhz PII with enough ram (maybe all you need is more ram?) is quite useable and a 1000 mhz Celeron or Duron is plenty. I'm using a 750 mhz PIII right now and it wouldn't occur to me to spend money upgrading it.
They can just tell Microsoft to find a nice corner and autofellate if there is any complaint about "naked PCs".
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
This is a mine field, but if you must -- buy your machines as a bare bones kit that has the CPU mounted, heat sink installed, RAM installed, and a POST test before they ship it to you. Nothing cuts into margins like crushing CPUs. Trust me... nothing speeds things up like only screwing in the HDD, FDD, DVD/CDRW, and video - knowing you don't have to hork with mainboard settings or crushing CPUs. Did I mention how easy it is to crush a CPU? Buy good equipment too, cause you get to support it...
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
You're either crazy or just a masochist. Yes, it sounds cool and very geeky, but it's also rather impractical. The money your company would save by doing this in house would be lost on having to maintain them and pay you to set them all up (thus taking you away from your other duties.)
This would also take an insane amount of time. Sixty machines is a lot of boxen; optimistically it would take you an hour per machine to swap all the hardware around and reformat the drives and install Windows. In other words, you'd be down at least a week.
Order sixty new machines from an OEM and you're down 2 days tops. Plus you get the guarantee that the machines work (out of 60 boxes, you're bound to get some bad hardware) and you get a warranty from a reputable company, not to mention saving yourself a MAJOR headache.
If something goes wrong with one of the machines, you just call the vendor and straighten it out. If you roll you own, you have to spend time doing diagnostics, then tracking down the receipts, RMA from parts warehouses, limbo time for replacement parts.. All this time your company is paying you to not do the job they hired you for.
Sure, they can hire on another guy to help you, but then there goes all that money you saved having to pay his salary. So in the end, your company didn't really save any money, they just have 60 new machines with no comprehensive warranty, poor tech support, and probably a very frazzled and stressed admin. The geek factor sounds fun, but in reality, it would be more practical to order from a vendor.
As many other people have said, you probably don't want to do this in a business environment when you can get reliable machines for pretty cheap from Dell etc. But if you do decide to, here are some general brand recommendations based on my system assembly business experience (I've built and sold ~40 machines in the last 2 years):
Motherboard:
Asus is reliable and fast but also expensive. Look at Gigabyte, MSI, or FIC. (I especially like the Gigabyte GA-7ZMMH as an Athlon platform.)
CPU:
While I have nothing against Intel, AMD consistently kills them in the price/performance ratio. In the past 2 years I have yet to build an Intel based machine for a customer. I just lay out the options and they invariably pick AMD, but that's just my experience. The Duron is a good chip but I don't sell many of those either, people are usually willing to pay a little more for an Athlon of equivalent speed.
Memory:
Buy name brand memory, not generic stuff. I like Micron/Crucial personally, never had a stick go bad. Corsair and Mushkin make good stuff as well, although I had to RMA the only Corsair stick I've ever bought after about 6 months. Corsair customer service was excellent about it though.
Video Card:
Despite their bad reputation some places, I've had good luck with ATI cards when I need a video card. The Radeon VE provides some nice features at a good price point. But in a business environment, get a motherboard with integrated video if you don't need much. If you buy an NVidia card, do some research on the card's manufacturer and look for a reputation of stability.
Hard Drives:
In machines I build, I use almost exclusively Seagate. Good performance, good price, and I've had zero quality problems with them. I feel about the same about Maxtor. I used a couple Quantum drives in my early systems with no difficulties. I don't have any recent experience with Western Digital so I can't really comment on them. IBM drives are too expensive unless you really need the slight performance edge some models offer.
Optical Drives:
I've had stupendous success with Afreey CD and DVD drives. Only had one fail and that was after some kicked the extended disc tray (we were able to open it up and fix it actually). Afreey drives are also very inexpensive.
CD burner wise I stick with Sony. We tried several different brands (Plextor, Acer, etc..) and found that Sony offered excellent quality for a very reasonable price. Plextor is good quality but you pay extra for the Plextor name.
Enclosures/Power Supply:
Antec cases are top quality and have excellent Antec power supplies. They are lots of less expensive cases you can get (and lots of more expensive ones), but Antec had never let me down. If you do get a cheaper case, get it without a power supply and buy a good Sparkle/Antec power supply for it.
(I don't work for any of the abovementioned companies and I don't profess to be an expert on this topic. Just sharing the experience I've had as a system builder who has dealt with a little more volume and long term support than your average hobbyist. We are by no means a high volume shop so I'm sure there are lots of people out there with more experience than me, hopefully they will respond if they feel I'm wrong about any of the parts I've recommended.)
-Sokie
------
Where are the slash-groupies? I distinctly remember being promised slash-groupies!
One thing to add is that summer is almost upon us, and with that season comes many students looking for summer jobs. A couple fliers taken around to the local high school should get your plenty of high schoolers who'd be perfectly competent swapping motherboards/ram/hard drives. Ten bucks an hour to a high school student is better than flipping burgers, and far less than a salried employees time.
AMD cpu and mobos are fine. I recommend the combination of the low-end Duron processors and the any of Via or SIS chipset motherboard.
:)
However, I am wondering about the reason why your colleagues find the limitation of 400MHz speed. Often users mistakenly think their CPU is slow when their disk drive is swapping for more memories. One easy workaround is simply addming more memories. I suspect 400Mhz machines used to be shipped with 128Mb of memories. Upgrading those memories to 256Mb or 386Mb will be one of the most effective performance-per-unit-cost upgrade solution.
Also, think about reinstalling Win2k. Win2k is much more stable and faster than Win ME or 98, but formatting and reinstalling the entire partition often cleans up the trashes built up in the system registry, leading to overall performance enhancements. A user might have a lot of autostarting programs installed hidden.
Investing on the displays and the human interface devices (keyboards and mice) can be another solution. If there are a lot of users complaining about their monitor performance, then try to *sacrifice* performance upgrade to the monitor upgrade. A decent 15" TFT flatpanel monotor can cost $400 and people often get less fatigue when they work with TFT flatpanel than CRT monitors. For me, I'd rather have a flat panel monitor than to have processor & memory upgrade. A combination of memory upgrade and the flat panel monitor purchase can be very appealing under certain circumstatnces if the workers have to look at the monitors for a long time every day. You don't need to squeeze your budget with a lot of possible component combinations in this case.
Good luck,
My 2Ghz P4 Dells are:
- 256MB DDR Ram
- 80GB 7200RPM Maxtor HD
- Builtin Sound, Ethernet
- CD-RW Drive
- Full Tower case (solid)
I've been building clone boxes my whole life, but I couldn't pass this Dell up. This is pretty typical on Dell's site.I usually check gotapex.com for deals.
Today they have a business class Dell P4 1.6GHz GX240 for $357.64 shipped. You can't build a loaded clone machine from scratch for that much, let alone one covered by a 3 year warranty.
I know it would be 'nice' to get a little snappier systems for your company but these do the job, keep em. At my previous company 90% of the employees had DELL PPro 200's running NT4. it did what you needed for office type work.
save the money. You may need it if the time comes for determining severence packages ;-).
As for building the PCs yourself. Having worked in this capacity before. Building from scratch I could average between 9-14 PCs in a 9 hour day with interruption, thats just assembly with a quick P.O test NOT including installing the OS on the boxes. It's nothing you would get done all at once during a consecutive period of time. From your perspective the rollout could take forever (like a month) and then you have to deal with all the quirks that come up. Your time is more important than that.
Peter
www.alphalinux.org
First off.. What the hell are you doing that requires more than a P-III 400?
W2K and office 2K run perfectly on it. unless you are running games or software development there is no sane reason to upgrade. (web development OUTSIDE graphics design does not, contrary to what the web-designers think, need any more power than that either)
Is your desire to upgrade purely for functionality? what profit gains or gains in productivity will you realize from the upgrades? if you can give solid financial numbers showing that profits will increase then go for upgrading.. If you are just stroking an itch or ego.... dont waste the money. W2K+O2K works fine on P-II 366's. and that is where I am keeping the sales department until machines break, or corperate loses their mind and tries to shove XP down our throats.. (we JUST migrated to W2K.. I dont see XP within 3 years) other than that it is just wasting money.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
...at least, it's a 450MHz Celeron, running Mandrake Linux 8.2 which came with OpenOffice.org 641d. It does all I ask of it, even OCR and stuff, without complaining. Not sure why you would want a P4 sace heater when a fast P3 gets 90% of the work done for 50% of the power. The reduction in the dotcom's power bill would probably pay for a second processor over a couple of years.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
My first post on /. ever!
If you use the nforce chipset from Nvidia you can install ONE driver from Nvidia for all parts (Sound, Video, IDE, 10/100 NIC, USB, PCI, etc.). They make drivers for Win95/98/Me, Win2000/XP, and Linux. As everything is intergrated, managment and assembly should be EZ.
I would go Micro-ATX for cost. Poking aroung newegg gives you a CDr&cable, 1.3ghz Duron&HSF, 512mb of ram, a case, 30gb 7200rpm HD, and a floppy for only $530. Note: The nforce needs 2 DIMMs for optimal performance.
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?
I know this is a little late, but here's a solution we've come up with that's in the cooker for some of our clients in a similar situation.
:-)
Basically you should invest $4,000 in a single server, RAID SCSI drives, dual athlon, 2 gigs of RAM. You've already got a 10/100 Mb backbone for your network, so you can slip this in just about anywhere.
Now here's where it gets fun. Load your favorite distro of linux, visit the Linux Terminal Server Project, and make a terminal server out of it. Then, check out MOSIX, or Sun's grid-computing (the later sports better redundancy, a feature I adore when working with end-users). Grab nics and boot-roms for each PC, install 'em, and boom, you've got a complete functioning cluster of what, 40 PII's? You have any idea the power those can muster?
Not only will you see a huge boost in computing power, but you also save money. Need to use quick books? What's a single liscence for Citrix cost? You can publish the app natively on your terminal server. Open Office works great for converting all those old MS documents.
Honestly, KDE 3.0 just came out. Use it.
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
No, he's building new boxes. Even if he wasn't, no MS OS licence has allowed `recycling' after Windows 95, so changing the CPU would axe the licence.
Mandrake Linux's licence allows you to recycle an installation. Come to think of it, you're also allowed to copy an existing installation, install as amny times as you like from the Download CD set, benchmark it against other things, use an unlimited number of seats, and comes with OpenOffice.org 641D. Oh, and even if you spot Mandrake $50 a machine, that works out at around 1/10 of the cost of MS-Windows+MS-Office, and no free viruses.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I've worked for a white-box builder/consulting company and now i'm a sysadmin. I've been on both sides of the build or buy question and i've finally decided to buy pre-built boxes...here's why:
Replacement parts availability.
That nifty Athlon board from MSI, ABIT, Epox, and the like won't be around 1 year from now. If you image machines, you will most likely have to create new images when you service/replace hardware. (Win2k doesn't like having its boot controllers moved around very much...you'll get the "inaccesable boot device error".)
The upfront cost savings may be attractive, but there isn't a free lunch...you'll have to spend more time maintaining different platforms.
-ted
...which may or may not apply to your situation, but is something to think about if you are not a) totally married to Windows, b)it's not a huge network, and c) the network is otherwise well secured:
You can use old x486s as semi-dumb/thin clients to an app server using xdm -- the app server's X server just redirects the output to the users monitor.
I've set this up before and the performance is really very good. The x486s can have the OS installed locally so that they don't bog down the server booting from the network. Administration is centralized. Also, you can probably just keep using the workstation you have, otherwise, old boxes are cheap to find.
The downside of course is that it should only be done on a trusted network, etc. Again, if you need Windows, this is probably a useless idea.
All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. - Johann Sebastian Bach
You may get a tax break if you donate the used computers to local schools etc.
If you could donate or sell each 400 mHz box for a $200 tax credit, upgrading would not be worthwhile!
MS-Word 97 sometimes won't read docs from (for example) MS-Word 2000 or MS-Word XP. In those circumstances I've used StarOffice 5.2 to reprocess the document and make it work. OpenOffice.org would probably do an even better job of it.
Come to think of it, why bother keeping MS-Office? It's only another invitation for the BSA (BSAA in Oz) to bitchslap you for not having a matching holo-sticker.
Also, if office work is all that the machine is doing, upgrade it to Linux. Mandrake 8.2 even comes with OO. Let's see the BSA fine you for that. Buy a decent scanner for each office cluster out of the savings, and SANE it so all can play.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If you don't already know the answer, you probably aren't the one who should be building the new systems. Most companies I know only replace a portion of their hardware at a time.
clancey
As far as the flames you direct against AMD, I'd say they're mostly, uhm, bullshit, I think the term is.
But you have brought up an interesting point. Know the old adagium 'no one's ever been fired for buying IBM'? Well, it's still around today and it's called 'no one's ever been fired for buying Intel'.
If your AMD craps out, your boss will be all over you for choosing a 'non standard CPU'. If your Intel craps out, it's just bad luck (which it is if your AMD craps out as well, but your boss doesn't know that).
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
how many of those systems will die 2 years earlier down the line because of latent failures created when you worked on them. The FET transistors and high-density components in PC's are sensitive to static electricity. Just because it doesn't fail as soon as you plug it in doesn't mean you haven't damaged it. From the huge amount of faulty parts (RAM etc) I had when I was an engineer I'd guess lots of people in the industry don't bother with anti-static.
Rolling your own box is great for a small network or a special system. All my home machines are self-rolled, it's worth the savings. However in a large, corporate environment, it ceases to be practical. Presumably, if resources are strained, you probably have better things to do then sitting down and killing tons of time diagnosing occasional hardware issues. It may even make you look less competent (what, he is still fixing that box? Dell would have fixed it by now). An OEM always has spare systems to swap out on a moments notice, and can do the swap and worry about more thorough diagnostics later, while you can not.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
60 boxes saving $600 each is $36,000. I doubt the roll out would take more than a month or so, but then again I don't know how long it takes to set up win2k uglies. At the $5.00/hr a MSCE is worth, the company should be a winner unless it takes more than 45 of them to do it.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
But seriously I have worked on many many systems over the years and I have never had a problem which could be credibly linked to hardware failure brought on by ESD. I think that lots of less-experienced techs and help desk people blame any problem that they can't figure out on ESD. Got a BSOD that you can't explain? Here's a convenient line that no one can really disprove and makes you look smart. "It must have been mishandled by some other ignorant tech years ago and is just now showing symptoms." Right. How could even tell the difference between an ESD problem and a problem caused by irregular AC line voltages or manufacturing defects?
What the hell is a "latent failure"? As was stated above, ESD is measured in kV while CMOS tolerances are more like 30V. Either a transistor is blown or it isn't. I agree that ESD can damage transistors, and I also know that a computer may very well power up after suffering damage from this. However I think the notion that a system would power up and work normally for two years before going south is ludicrous. You seem to think that the static can somehow "weaken" the hardware without fully blowing it out.
My personal solution to the ESD problem is a compromise between the incredibly annoying wrist strap and "going commando" and risking relatively expensive hardware. I leave the power supply plugged into a grounded outlet while working on the machine. I know somebody's gonna flame me for this, but think about it. When the machine is plugged in the entire chassis is a path to ground which can bleed off excess voltage in the case of a static discharge. If you simply touch the chassis before you start working you will discharge any static electricity which is being carried by your body and you're good to go. Unless you are working on your computer while standing on a shag carpet in your socks while rubbing a balloon on your head then this is probably all you need to be safe. You could then unplug the AC line if you wanted, although I don't see any harm in leaving it plugged in during your entire operation. Outside of the power supply the voltages can be no more than 12V and low current so electric shock is really not an issue.
On a side note I think a much more common issue is the failure of the power supply itself, rather than motherboards and chips. In most machines I build the PS will burn out after a couple of years unless I spend a few extra dollars on a step-up model case like an Enlight.
Alright, flame away.
alex
--- Wherever you go, everyone is always connected...
I'm not sure what the chances are you'll even see this. 450 posts and the ones modded up are pretty negative. Oh well. . .
I'm currently rolling custom built machines for our 200 systems network. Oh, and I'm the only tech here. I do the servers, network, help desk planning, everything.
My place is a non-profit where a very small, chaotic budget. I'm never sure exactly when I'll have money to spend or how much. For strange reasons, when we go to spend money we have to go through a maze to buy complete equipment, but components are no problem. We couldn't buy a new company car, but we could buy all the parts to put a car together ourselves. Same goes for computers.
The savings we've seen building ourselves are huge. Adding the costs of the pieces and my time spent planning, building, and supporting these systems it is still cheaper than OEM systems and a support contract. A+ certified techs are a dime a dozen, so support of these wintel systems isn't really a factor if I were to leave. (They'd have to get a half dozen to do what I'm doing by myself in 40 hours a week, plus an MCSE and a CCNA, so I'm not worried about job security).
Here are some tips:
1) Plan out your configuration and use it for the next year. The most important component is the motherboard. It should be able to accept more RAM and a faster CPU than you are going to use initially. Spend lots of time developing a stable, user-friendly software config (OS and apps). As you need to replace systems throughout the year, use this config. After six months update the config with a faster CPU, more RAM, and maybe a larger HD. Update your software config with patches, fixes, stuff like that now also. At the year mark you can plan your new config.
2) Integrated components are your friend. I like the nVidia nForce boards because they have the (good) sound, video, and network integrated. Also, if one manufacturer stops making your board, you should be able to switch to another manufacturer but still use the same drivers. Very important for ghosting!
3) You really don't need the management software for 60 computers. That stuff is usually designed (and priced) for enterprises with several hundred if not thousands of systems. You should be able to keep most of that stuff in your head and in a small text-file database. Learn a little Python/tk and you can even build your own front end to the text-file. Cool!
4) Develop a relationship with a couple local component vendors, and a couple Internet vendors and have them bid for any purchase more than a couple grand. You'll definetely save money this way, especially if they know they are bidding and not just giving a price quote. I've saved thousands of dollars on a single purchase this way. Also, after a while the local guys will probably be able to send a couple guys your way to help out every once-in-a-while when you get swamped or stuck as a thank you for your business. Very Cool!
Following these tips, you only have four platforms to work with, you've saved money, you know exactly what you are working with, and you get a sense of pride from creating something from your own two hands.
I really can't recommend this approach highly enough.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Drinking is almost mandatory before a lot of computer work! How else would I summon the courage and forget the past pain of maintaining Windows?
I've worked with a school board that decided to roll their own for every single school in the county. Each school theoretically had the same setup, but what really happened was that for each phase of the project the machines changed, both in terms of their hardware and their software. This became a huge headache for replacement of the machine parts.
For example, the vendor ran out of a certain video card and so provided us with the model one-up as an RMA when one of the video cards died. This means the user gets an improved card, however what it really means is a driver headache (the ghost image for all those PCs has to be upgraded to support the new vid card as well as the old one) and a possibly non-working configuration since the new card hasn't been tested.
Then, you run into the asset management of keeping track of the different phases of the project. This was a large project, so there were lots of different configurations to keep track of. If you are planning on keeping the number of distinct phases small, you may be able to make it work. However, keep in mind that when a 2 year old computer fails, warranty or no warranty you may have trouble replacing a component with exactly the same one. Even a hard drive can cause a headache, if the replacement is larger than some BIOS or OS limitation and your ghost image fails on it.
The keys to the success of this project are as follows:
1. Always have spare parts on hand, for each phase. I'd say you'd ideally have at least one spare box, maybe two depending on the size of the phase, and maybe a few hard drives and cdroms. As you find certain parts more problematic than others, get more spares in future phases.
2. Asset management (hardware, software, firmware, drivers, etc) is crucial. You must know what's in each box; sometimes even a BIOS "upgrade" will screw you up.
3. Using something like Ghost to transfer operating systems is great until users start storing data on local disks. You will need to make sure that they at least use a separate partition, or even better a network storage.
If you keep the number of phases small, it should ideally be no problem. In theory there are only a few different PCs to fix, so once you can fix one, you can fix them all. But once you let non-standard software and hardware creep into the different boxes the theory breaks down and support becomes a nightmare.
Mark
It depends on what your users are doing...but lets do the math. If you are looking at 60 computers at roughly $600/upgrade. Why not take that $36,000 and roll it into a Win2k Terminal Server. You can build several nice multi-processor servers and let everyone connect via the client...make the server do the work. The only licensing concers would come in if you had any win9x boxes on the network. Win2k Pro shouldn't eat up a CAL. BTW...you can really lock the users down so they dont mess anything up or load those goofy screen savers and other crap.
Once in a while you can get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right. -Hunter/Garcia
I do the same, but just be careful. If you are working on an ATX system, and there is no "hard kill" switch on the back of it (a rocker switch usually), then the motherboard is still getting the 3.3 volt standby voltage. It's probably a bad idea to be plugging things in with this voltage on. That said, I've done it before, without apparent ill effect, but stil, probably not a good idea.
:)
Another option if the PS doesn't have a hard kill switch is to plug it into a power strip that can be turned off, and just turn off the power strip, ground is NEVER broken in a properly designed electrical system, even when things are turned off. Of course if you broke off your ground priong so you could plug your computer in to your 60 year old house wiring, all bets are off.
In the case of the broken ground, watch out, switching power supplies without ground float the chassis around 60 volts at low current, enough to wake you up if you are a better ground than whatever the case is sitting on, but probably not too dangerous, UNLESS there is a malfunction in the power supply, in which case you could become a crispy critter. In any case, good ground is a good idea, lots of things are affected badly by floating grounds.
This same thing applies when you use a UPS and just pull the plug out to test it, without that ground reference, the ground will float, so watch out.
As far as the "to unplug or not to unplug" debate, there is probably a credible argument that even though you don't have a good ground when the case if off and unplugged, things like static electricity will dissipate whenever you touch a large metal object like the chassis, due to leakage effects.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I leave the PC plugged in, if you turn the wall plug off the earth is still connected so you are earthed by touching the chassis.
It's better than nothing, but if you did that while working on the Space Shuttle's guidance computers, you'd probably be bludgeoned. And rightly so.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
We used to have lovely Sun 20" monitors, and as good as they were, they do start to fade after 6 years.
Plus I do like having brand-name hardware on lease, all of it is under 3-year warranty so if it ever dies, it just gets sent back. There's a lot of attraction to PHBs in having that kind of predictable hardware cost rather than episodic bouts of upgrades, "If we spend Y dollars per person per year, everyone will always have a current model PC that is under warranty on their desk".
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
And an addendum to that, you can get a 4 pin molex to P4 connector from Cyberguys, and I'm sure from many other places.
The only caveat is that you need to use a direct line from the power supply that has nothing else on it, to prevent power noise issues.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
But there's no reason to get new monitors if the old ones work. Buy systems with no monitor. Replace the keyboards and mice, though; they wear out, and they're cheap.
I used to run a small computer shop -- 30-100 PCs a month kind of place.
We used to do hand-builds, then eventually switched to getting 'mostly configured' systems we could then further customize for the customer.
_If_ you know exactly what you're doing, _and_ you have a number of good contacts with various suppliers, _and_ you get a good batch of parts with no incompatabilities -- in other words, best case scenario you will have:
A: A big pile of boxes to assemble. The days of jumpers and whatnot are mostly gone, but you still need to figure out how everything fits together, do it 10, 20, 30, whatever times in a row, and never break anything or have a DOA part. And even though there probably aren't a lot of jumpers, there are still finicky CMOS settings to set correctly and equivalently on all of the machines.
B: To then load everything. This is generally best done on one 'master' system with that disk image 'ghosted' onto the other hard drives. Sounds simple, but setting up that master image properly can take a while. Perhaps you'd have to do this with a Dell anyway. YMMV.
C: To deal with any integration problems -- hard drive fails? Call the hard drive vendor. Flaky problems? Oops, you couldn't afford a RAM tester or other diagnostic equipment, and so you play the swap-out game -- you pretty much need a complete computer on the side for this kind of troubleshooting. And a _lot_ of time on your hands.
And this is absolute best case. The crackpot idea of upgrading the mobo in place and re-using the hard drive, video, etc. is fine in principle, but in practice doesn't scale beyond the one-off home hobbyist sort of thing.
Worst case is that you buy parts for perhaps 20 systems, get about 14 built, RMA 3-4 hard drives, have some strange driver problems with the video cards, and get 2-3 variations of motherboard --- rev. 1, rev. 2, one yellow one green -- whatever, RAM seems to be flaky, but you're not sure if it's a CMOS setting or a bad MOBO or a bad RAM module, and if the latter, which one it might be. Start chewing through all of the permutations and eventually you figure it out and maybe get 18 of the original 20 built, the other two are constantly rotated with various users as their desktops crap out.
IMHO other than for home hobbyist use, getting a Dell/IBM/Compaq/Gateway/HP/insert favorite brand here/whatever computer beats the heck out of a roll-your-own system.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
That's it. I've only fried a single component ever, an old hard drive, and it was because I drove around with the components rubbing against the cloth seats in my car in the sun in mid-winter, sliding around. I reached out and picked it up and felt the shock. uh-oh. Sure enough, it was toast. But it's still pretty rare.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
Remember the article the other day when we all laughed at the Wilkes Barre IT guy who stopped the IBM maintenance on the AS/400 ? Well, this is the same kind of thinking: penny-wise and pound foolish.
Remember: support contracts are a form of insurance. They insulate you from the risk associated with the issue at hand. When looking at any form of insurance, you have to take into account what the worst-case senario is, and if you can handle it. In your case, the scenario is that you have multiple desktop failures, including critical failures of important machines (ie, severl of your main developers). Do a cost analysis: if I do a roll-my-own machine, what's the cost of it breaking? How much does it cost for that developer to have no (or a seriously inferior) machine for a week or more, vs. the 1 or 2 days a supported machine would be out?
For small companies, (especially those heavy in software development) I can't imagine a situation where the TCO of a fully-supported system is worse than a roll-your-own box. None The downtime and IT personnel time alone will kill that equation. For huge companies, it may pan out, but for a 60-desktop company with 1 IT person? Not a chance.
You need to put this into perspective with Management. Once again, they are looking at only the up-front costs, and none of the hidden costs, which in this case are the majority. Explain to them what the true cost of a desktop is, and how NOT buying a supported machine results in a WORSE return over the next year.
Now, here's a couple of recommendations for getting SUPPORTED desktops into your organization while not breaking the budget and still meeting increased performance needs:
I don't mean to harp on you personnally, but this kind of thing is why IT has a long, long way to go before being really professional. Folks, this isn't a garage. IT folks need to quite thinking like it's an expanded hobby, and also need to remind the Executives of this, too. It's a Profession, not a Trade.
-Erik
Systems/Network Architect and former SysAdmin
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Not to sound too cynical, but my ORG has had this issue come up many times. The best solution is to let the users suffer with the 400's until they make enough noise to get the attention of your CFO. Then you can get the money you need to present them with a complete solution. If you solve this problem "on the cheap", you will need to solve all future IT problems in this way. I am guessing you do not get paid enough to build "home-brew" solutions for everything. Save those resources for your servers and routers! Good Luck, Tony
We went through this at my last job. I think that you are better off to go with new machines with a 3 year warranty. Subtract the price that you can likely get for the old machines, maybe $150-$200 and you are really looking at $200-$250 more for entirely new machines.
Those parts that you are going to re-use are also getting old. Here are things that can go wrong:
- The cases have been sitting under somebody's desk collecting dust bunnies. Those fans will start sounding like lawnmowers soon. Then you will have to replace the fan or the power supply. Parts + your time = You just blew your savings there.
- Those CD ROMS have also been collecting dust and getting beat up by users. They'll start to act funny, have trouble reading disks, etc. Inevitably your boss's boss will have trouble with his. After screwing around with it he will call you to replace it. You just blew your savings and lost a little credibility.
Buy from a good manufacturer with good service. If something goes wrong, you can have them mail you a new part. You don't need to stock extras.
At my last job we made a deal with HP. We got the desktops for only about $50 more than we could build them. They came with 3 year warranties. Since we were buying so many of their machines they took care of us. Any parts we needed, we got. Every year we budgeted for 1/3 of our total machines. Now nobody has a machine older then 3 years old, they don't have any oldball machines sitting around, and OS and software deployment only need to be tested on a few types of machines. Users are happy because they have good machines and good response for the occasional hardware problem. Support folks are happy because they are bothered by bad fans, etc.
my company mirrors yours.. same user base, same problem two years ago. i was in the same spot as you and I did build the machines myself.
two years later, would i ever do it again? nah. replace what you can replace, it's not worth the headache, and while i don't use openimage i will say that using a single vendor when possible is very nice, i have only 4 images for a company now with ~130 desktops...
if you know what you're doing, it will be a fun project... but i'll tell you building all those machines gets pretty damn tedious.
I admit it, I am careless about anti-static precautions. I don't wear a wriststrap, I don't stand on a rubber mat, and I don't have a proper workbench. I do most of my computer work on the dining room table, which is fine as long as I don't set the hard drive on the (open) butter dish and get done before dinner.
However... I live in a very humid climate. Most of the year, I can't build up a noticeable static charge even if I shuffle my sock-clad feet across the shag carpet. Things change in the winter, when it gets dry; I try to avoid working on the internals of my computers then.
I do ground myself to bleed off any static before opening my computers or handling any components. So far, things seem to work, though I do have the occasional brain-damaged motherboard--which I can't tell if it's because of my sloppy anti-static habits or because I buy cheap motherboards. However, the vendor is pretty no-hassle about replacing bad ones, and they are cheap enough in the first place that replacing a slightly flaky one two years down the road when I want to upgrade to the next CPU anyway is no big deal.
YMMV. Frankly, I probably couldn't get away with my current practices in a drier climate.
---dragoness
If you're looking at a $400 difference, perhaps you can recoup some of that by selling off the old systems at auction. I'm sure they're worth $200-$300. Then you have the benefits of new supported machines from the big guys, without the hassles of supporting your own systems, and the cost factor is minimalized.
Just be sure to erase those drives several times, and make sure you conform to whatever license transfer blah blah M$ wants.
Actually, it is the voltage.
Since we're talking STATIC electricity, there is, by definition, NO current flow.
The problem with static charge buildup and FETs is called punchthrough. Electric field strength is measured in Volts per Meter (V/m) The gate thickness of a typical CMOS FET is on the order of nanometers (1x10^-9 m).
Our 15 kV static voltage produces in the gate region of the FET a field of (15kV)/(40x10^-9 m) = 375x10^9 V/m.
According to this link the dielectric strength of (Pyrex) glass 14x10^6 V/m. Applying a field stronger than this will cause ionization of the material: electrons will be literally knocked off their atoms! This ionization allows a current to flow through the (normally) insulative material, called dielectric breakdown. In a CMOS FET, gate insulator ionization leaves residual conduction paths, ruining the transistor (punchthrough).
CMOS FETS have very thin gate insulators to increase performance, but the side-effect is that they can tolerate only very small static gate voltages without damage.
I posted earlier in support of buying new PC's. Just thought I'd throw out another idea: lease them. Given that PC's are business tools that aren't going away, you might be better off with a 24 month lease. Though terms of the lease itself would indicate whether it was beneficial or not. Your company avoids the initial expenditure of funds to purchase your own PC's. Just a thought.
I am commenting as someone who has scratch-built many PCs, both for home and business use. First, I'll assume you know what your needs are, and not try to tell you that your 400 Mhz Pentiums are just fine. You said you need to upgrade, I'll take your word for it. I'm also not going to tell you exactly what you should buy, I assume you know what you need/want. And your Win2K license terms aren't my problem, either. Other people have also commented well on anti-static issues.
First, don't start this job until you are comfortable tearing computers apart and putting them back together. Building and repairing computers is fairly simple these days, when everything is componentized, but you do have to know what you are doing. You need to be able to understand those motherboard manuals and figure out what jumpers and BIOS settings you need for your particular configuration. You need to be able to screw motherboards into place and shove cards into slots without breaking them or slicing yourself open on the chassis (I swear every one of my personal computers is christened with my blood!), and plug cables in right-side up. All simple things to learn, but they can be expensive and frustrating to learn the hard way. If you're not comfortable doing these things, don't plan on building 60 PCs yourself. Farm the job out to a good local vendor or technician who is.
Line up a good vendor, either local or mail order, who can sell you what you need, when you need it (finding out replacement parts are unavailable or back-ordered for a month when you need them NOW is not helpful), at a satisfactory price and with a no-hassle return policy--because you will be returning bad components when you order enough for 60 PCs--unless you pay the higher price for a vendor that does 24-hour burn-in. Even then you may not weed out all the bad components.
Make your PCs as much alike as possible--it's easier to assemble a cookie-cutter configuration, and of course, ghosting a Win installation works a lot better if you're using the same drivers from computer to computer. As others have mentioned, don't cheap out on the components! Good quality, name-brand components are worth paying a few dollars extra for; you get fewer returns and mysterious failures, and name-brand quality components are more likely to actually follow the industry specs for whatever device they are, instead of cutting corners the way cheap components sometimes do. BTW, this is where you win over buying cheap pre-built computers: guys like Gateway and those Wal-Mart computers save money by putting the absolutely cheapest, bottom-of-the-line, no-name commodity parts in their computers. That's how they can sell them so cheap. Sometimes it works; back in the early 90s, the favorite no-name graphics card used in our company's computers had the Cirrus Logic chipset, which was a moderately accellerated, halfway decent graphics card
that actually had OS/2 drivers (which we were using). Usually, you have the problem with discount computers that the cheapest no-name card changes from week to week, so this week's discount computer may have entirely different components and drivers than last week's discount computer, even though they are supposedly the same model. Now that is a major hassle in the support department!
OTOH, some parts are so commodity that it doesn't matter. Who cares what brand floppy drive you buy? It's a mature technology and they all work alike. IDE CD-ROM drives are much the same way. IDE hard drives are NOT. Neither are SCSI drives.
I personally like Western Digital IDE drives and won't touch a Quantum if I can help it; YMMV.
If you're using AMD Athlons or similar chips, invest in a slot fan or bay fan in addition to the CPU fan. If the noise of all those fans is likely to drive people postal in a week, consider spending the extra dollars for low-noise fans.
So, you've got a vendor or three, and you've got a list of parts that meet your criteria for price, performance and quality. To lower your own frustration level, make sure you have plenty of tools; those Phillips-head screwdrivers and nut drivers seem to migrate of their own accord whenever you're not holding them in hand. Also, make sure you have plenty of small screws of various sizes, spare Y-junction internal power cables, and spare IDE cables. Save any leftover small screws that came with cases or whatever; you'll need them sooner or later. Spare mounting rails of various flavors are nice to have around; vendors never seem to ship the right mounting rails for your chassis, if they bother to ship mounting rails at all with the drives. If you are lucky, your chassis's don't need mounting rails at all, but support drives being bolted directly to the chassis. Wish mine did.
If an IDE drive doesn't work, check your master/slave jumper settings first, then the IDE cable (that's why you need spares--I've had a lot more bad cables than I ever had bad drives). Keep a "known good" AGP card around to test out the AGP slot when you think you have a bad graphics card--I've had more bad AGP slots on motherboards than I've had bad graphics cards or bad monitors.
Ditto for memory and memory sockets. (The quality control on certain brands *cough*SOYO*cough* of VIA-chipset motherboards was a bit off...) Also, watch the fun-n-games of putting PCI cards that don't share interrupts happily (NIC & AGP combo, particularly) in the wrong slots.
Being able to ghost the first OS + software installation onto all subsequent PCs is a major time and hassle saver.
As for "support" issues, if you can put together the PCs yourself, you can handle most support issues yourself. PC hardware is commoditized and componentized, and a hell of a lot easier to support than PC software. Keep "known good" components around for troubleshooting, and have spares of everything on hand, including and especially power supplies. (Make sure you get an adequate power supply in the first place).
Anyway, hope this helps.....
---dragoness
A few years later, I had my dissertation laptop on my lap, and a mug of good beer (home made) in my right hand. Without warning, my wife plopped one of the rahter new (3 months?) twins in my left arm. Immediately, she kicked, spilling beer on the keyboard of the new (to me) thinkpad, thus becoming BoKD.
The keyboard wasn't happy. Heck, the bios wouldn't even boot due to the errors. When all else failed, I let the keyboard hang from the case so that the case could support it in the sink, removed the battery, and let the keyboard soak overnight. It took three days to dry, but all the keys worked again. I did lose the rubber springs for two of the keys when my wife spilled the bowl, though . .
Anyway, if you need to do this, most keyboards will survive it (besides, what do you have to lose?). Distilled water is a better idea than tap water, though . .
More recently, a friend sent an older powermac for my kids. She used to be a chain smoker; you could smell the machine from a few feet away. I took the opportunity, and had my disgusted oldest daughter (the one with the apple juice; now 8 years older) help clean it. I'm reasonably sure that after seeing that (along with some comments from me about lungs) she'll never smoke
She had to wash the pieces in the sink
I removed the electronics from the keyboard and ran it through the dishwasher without soap. It didn't survive
hawk
:)
hawk
I'll bite. The reason why I'll flame you for leaving a machine plugged in while you work on it is that the ATX motherboard spec gives power to the motherboard while the machine is off. Even if it didn't, you still have a great ground to the machine, which leaves in the slight possibility of electrocuting yourself if you find a power source (why do you think that the static wrist straps have resistors in them?). The trick should be, ground the chassis (with the resister), then make sure your are touching the chassis while you are working on the machine.
Just my $.02
I'd say no. Not because its a bad idea, but because you're asking.
If you can't tally in your head the pros and cons of a homebuilt vs an OEM solution, I have to doubt that you have the knowledge and experience needed to build and maintain 50 machines on your own. From the sound of your article, you seem to be very price driven, and buying cheaper parts is usually hell in the long run. (Well, 'cept the cheap cnet nics for $9 apeice. Won't run under linux, and the performance isn't great, but they are rock stable under windows and I've never seen one go out).
That being said, if I had to homebuild machines for the office, here's what I'd do. First of all, everyone doesn't need the latest and greatest. Break the office into 2 or 3 groups. First group gets the highend stuff, second group gets the average stuff, and the third group gets whatever will run a basic wordproc and email client. Thus, you have a machine rotation path, first->second->third. Those 400 mhz machines sound great for the third group, and maybe even the second, with a memory upgrade. Btw, this is a great lesson for you: a lack of memory and slow hard drives will make even the fastest machine seem slow - thus don't skimp on memory to buy a faster CPU and don't stick a 3 gig HDD into a 1700+ Athlon XP.
For the machines, but a quality motherboard. You don't want to go for the top performer, but for stability. Right now, I've had great experiences with the Gigabyte GA-7VTXH+ (Socket A DDR, 100/133 mhz bus, built in creative sound, realtek nic) and the Tyan S2390B (Socket A, 100/133 mhz bus, no sound/lan). Buy memory from a trusted supplier (mushkin & crucial seem nice), and use memtest86 for a few hours per machine for testing, and burncpu from a floppy (I'd suggest tomsrbt). Since you will support these machines, you want them to be stable. Also, grab yourself a large (locking) file cabinet, give a number to each machine, and store all manuals/cds/floppys/software in the file cabinet in a folder with the machine's number. That way, software audits are easy, users won't be able to install software on unauthorized machines, and you'll always have the documentation. For hard drives, use 40 giggers. They won't need the room (since they'll be putting all essential data on the server), but a 40 gig seems to be the optimal price/size ratio. Throw a cheap 8 or 32 meg vid card in with good 2D support and no history in the usenet archives of having problems with 9x/NT/2k/XP, use a quality floppy/cd drive, and you're set. All windows installations are scriptable, or else you can ghost the drives, and make sure you install a good antivirus client (Norton AV Corp is expensive, but nice).
The advantage is, you get a machine that's built your way, without all the added crap software OEMs throw on them. The disadvantage is that you lose tech support, so you probably need to develope the skills to type in "groups.google.com" in your browser and search for problems. Anyone with an A+ and half a brain in their head can maintain their machines, which doesn't make it easy, since there is a severe lack of people out there with at least half a brain in their head. (And don't get me started about "teach to the test" A+ courses...)
Just my $.02
Check out something cheaper like Compaq Evo D300v. At $569, it's comparable to what you'd spend to build your own and it would be all new components. It even comes with Windows XP and a 1-year on-site warranty (can be extended to 3-years for $99 more). Other OEMs have similar packages available, but I'll use Compaq as an example since that's what I'm familiar with.
Why do I think that this is a better solution? Here's why:
1. It's pre-built and will save you the time and hassle of selecting, assembling, and testing components. Compaq has taken care of the problems of making sure that all the bits are ccompatible, so there's no headaches over wondering if the problem that you are experiencing is a hardware conflict or something else.
2. If something breaks, call 1-800-OK-COMPAQ and have them fix it. It's not your problem. That's much easier than trying to get a vendor or manufacturer to provide warranty service on a mainboard that died. More importantly, a component vendor or manufacturer might require you to ship components back and forth (if you're lucky, just cross-ship) before determining that there needs to be a warranty replacement. You're potentially looking at 2+ weeks to replace a faulty component. With an OEM like Compaq you can have the problem part replaced next business day. That's a big difference in a business setting.
3. If something breaks after you leave the company, your replacement will know who to call for assistance. They won't have to worry about checking warranty status on a widget and then getting a vendor to replace it. This offers peace of mind for the business principals.
4. If you need updated device drivers, they're all in one place at www.compaq.com. Locating and downloading softpaks is far more convenient than scouring the Internet for the latest versions of somebody's reference drivers.
5. If you want it, you'll have access to Compaq Insight Management Tools. You don't use anything like them now probably, and you may not in the future. But at least you'll have the option.
6. As far as system specs go, you'll get a 1.3GHz processor, 20 GB hard disk, an Intel NIC, 128 MB of RAM and decent integrated video and sound. The average office worker doesn't even come close to needing the power of a 1.3 GHz system. Sure you could get faster parts, but unless you're doing 3D modeling (in which case you're already shelling out $3000-$4000 for a high-end video card) or running intensive engineering or financial simulations you'll be OK for several years with what's included. Granted, you wouldn't want this on your desk at home for gaming but it's a pretty decent work machine.
7. Microsoft Windows is included. OK, a lot of people think that's not necessarily a good thing. But if you're going to be running Windows anyway, you might as well get it included so that you can be legal with it. Building your own PCs would prevent you from transferring your OEM licenses from the old machines to a new machine (legally speaking anyways).
In my opinion it's a no-brainer.
remember the old amstrad 512 and 640 well if you were upgrading the 512 to 640kb ior ram you had to uinsert chips manually and they reccomemded putting it on the kitchen sink, grounded through the buildings earthing and touching metail before a chip or PCB.
Yeah. It was a new thing, all this new-fangled CMOS. :) The good old days, when motherboards were full of TTL logic (SN74xx), the Internet connection was a 300 baud acoustic-coupled modem, and UUCP e-mail was too complicated for spammers to have figured out.
[sigh]
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Try KOffice or AmiPro under FluxBox on a cut-down Linux kernel, it'll fly on those boxes - and keep OpenOffice.org around for compatibility reasons, even if it runs like a 3-legged centipede in 32M. Alternatively, run them LTSP off a single decent server.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing