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Dell or HP for Small Business?
fruitbane asks: "I work for a medium-sized non-profit, approximately 50 full-time users and 100 desktop PCs. We're redoing all our technology plans and budgeting; that means it's time to pick vendors/brands and stick to them, something we haven't reliably done in the past. Sites like Consumer Reports review various PCs and manufacturers for home users. Are there any comprehensive reviews or advice sources for those trying to determine the best vendor/manufacturer for small business desktops and laptops?"
1) What are your goals. Are they to save money?
2) Do you truly believe you will need "Gold/Platinum" support?
3) Can we get by without some of the big guys? (Dell/HP/etc.)
4) Is there room for savings/alternatives? (Dotproject vs. MS Project... Surgemail vs. Exchange + Outlook)
For 50 users, I'll give you a summary of what I worked with at one point a while back... Computers were a combo of Gateway and Acers we purchased off an auction lot. Most were from a business that went under. Minus HD's... We spent about $100.00 each for about 70 machines. Disks? We brought them in a lot as well. Servers, we purchased our own 1 Sun Netra 1 280r off of eBay for databases. Total cost about 500.00 for the servers. We purchased a brand new 2U server from Tiger and slapped on Linux for LAMP stuff and used SugarCRM, Surgemail, and Dotproject. Surgemail itself saved us big bucks from having to be scammed into using MS Exchange, etc.. Dotproject saved us from buying Project Server which we would have needed for what we needed to do. At first project managers didn't like it, but they also had Project on their personal machines anyway... They got over it. Project + Exchange for that SoHo (3 offices 70 or so people) would have been in excess of about 40k. (remember... seats, etc.). We ran NFS, Samba, and a couple of other things which were transparent to the layfolk. Bottom line we spent under 20k setting it up. Our most expensive purchases were Netscreen's to keep things secured (VPNs). Those cost us about 3k each.
Infiltrated dot Net
Once upon a time you'd buy from the biggest companies for service and reliability, and avoid small operators because of the hard time they'd give you.
That's all changed. HP are now heavily outsourced with increased breakdowns from PC's made in China (which, lets face it, never understood 'Quality'). HP have outsourced customer support to India. If you do have a problem, you'll have to argue with an arrogant call center operator who has been told he holds all the cards and that you are at his mercy. The company doesn't give a damn about quality or customer support.
Another poster suggested the local guy. I'd concur. The most important part of the PC is the motherboard (ASUS have a good name as a Taiwanese supplier who 'got' quality), HDD from Seagate or another reputable HDD manufacturer (fortunately most of the bad ones like IBM have been driven out of the business). Using a local guy you can get your own PCs built that'll be far better than any of the cost-cut, outsourced crap you'll get from the Multinationals. These days smaller companies have a much better grasp on quality and reputation. You'll also be supporting your community and country.
no company can make money selling quality components locally and compete with the Dell or HP model
That used to be true but Dell has gotten so greedy lately that you actually can build a decent quality white box for less, even allowing fo shipping, labor, time spent ordering parts etc. Now granted that's not if you're just buying from NewEgg or something, but if you're actually in the business and dealing with the distributors directly Dell really isn't a very good deal any more. Too bad really, they used to be hands down our #1 recommendation for machines but the last couple of years their quality (and support) has taken a major nose dive and the prices have gone up!
Even worse, I read an interview with a Dell exec a few months ago where he was asked what Dell planned to do about lagging sales and his response was that they were going to increase the number of options for the case styles and colors to appeal to younger buyers. WTF?!? Upper management obviously has a huge disconnect...
Rumor has it that Michael Dell may be coming back to turn things around but it'll be at least a couple of years before we're going to see any effect from that.
Do you have some sort of source for what you're saying about their LCDs discarding color data? I had a little trouble following your summary of the issue.
I'm not able to find the article any more. It was a couple of years ago when 17in LCD monitors really started to drop in price and Acer suddenly came out with a low end model that was $50 cheaper than anybody else. I was looking for info on it at the time and found a review site that had done some color testing and weren't seeing what they expected to. Front panel controls didn't fix it so they decided to pop the back and see if there was just a bad connection or something. When they did that they noticed that several banks of RAM were missing from the display controller. (The board was laid out for them but it was just bare solder pads).
Now having half the memory layout be empty doesn't mean anything per se, most boards are set up to handle a variety of different density chips with just a couple of jumpers to change. However, when they looked up the part number for the chips that were on there they found that the total memory on the board was only enough for 16-bit color at the native resolution of the panel. That's not something you can say "oops, we had a bad production run, so sorry", you have to actually tweak the controller firmware to ignore the higher end bits of the color info.
Further investigation showed that the specs for the monitor were cleverly worded to say it would "accept" 32-bit color signal and Acer just evaded the question when they were called on it.
So yeah, maybe they just did that on their absolute cheapest low-end model figuring 90% of the population can't visually tell the difference anyway but I've always thought it was a pretty dirty trick. (I've also heard horror stories about their support but don't have any direct experience).
The other side of the fence:
Dell desktops are semi-proprietary, great for business if that is the _exact_ system that you want at that time. Dell will also make minor configuration changes and revisions w/o any way of getting a 'previous' version.
Dell "Power Edge" servers -- well, they suck. DO NOT USE THEM FOR MISSION CRITICAL APPLICATIONS. Last time I checked, they still don't fix the bug in the RAID BIOS. (Bug - dual drive failure can't be properly detected, and on re-boot you will loose the logical drive and all data. The 'fix' is a bad joke)
Laptops: Similar issues to the desktop, and the occasional bonfire. However - they are simple to repair, and replacement parts are cheap and easy.
it's already outlasted an apple laptop a friend bought at about the same time.
I've bought 4 new, well really 3 and a factory remanufactered one, Windows PCs and of them only one did not have any hardware troubles in the first year I had them. On the other hand I've also bought 2 used Macs and they both lasted longer than the PCs did. The first Mac I got was an SE30 in 1992. It lasted without problems until 2000, when the floppy drive died. The second's a Powermac 7300/200 I got in 2000, a few months after the the first one died. It lasted until early 2006 when it refused to bootup. The first one I used for 8 years and the second for 6 years.
Because of my experiences with Macs and PCs, and because MS wants to treat it's customers like criminals, I've decided to switch entirely to Linux and Macs. Several months ago I got a new PC with Linux preinstalled, which I'll setup as a server, and for a laptop I plan on getting a Macbook Pro. Unless and until MS gets rid of it's requirements for Activation and the spyware if I can at all avoid it I will never again buy anything with Windows on it. Nor will I get Office.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Well I'd suggest your problem is not choosing between two different brands of conventional computers.
.15 per KWH for carbon based generation to the price of solar electric generation, which is currently perhaps $.40 to $1.20 per KWH, When electricity is priced as if it were solar electricity, low energy computers quickly become the lower total lifetime cost device.
The answer to "what kind of new computer?" is "It must be low energy consumption now."
The first point I would suggest is: Now is the time to begin aggressively moving to low energy consumption computing for general purpose office machines.
The conventional mass market machinery that I see is not dramatically better than my 700 mhz 1998 Athlon. My computer burns 176 watts ( about 90 watts for the CRT monitor, and 90 watts for the cpu with 2 disk drives, My machine also wastes 4 minutes starting ).
The typical $800 business box with a CPU running at 2% load for 99% of every 8 to 10 hour workday is way too much energy consumption for typical office work.
One way of arguing for low energy computers is look at the total cost of the electricity used over the lifetime of the computer. Then reprice the electricity from $
The problem is to deliver a way of doing the work of your organization with dramatically lower carbon burden. If you set a goal of replacing individual machines with machines that use 1/3 to 1/5 the energy of present office machines you will be moving towards a low energy business profile that will look good for 5 to 7 years.
Energy reductions in the 20% to 33% range mean you need cutting edge low energy systems. "Cutting edge" means as consumers we need quality comparative reviews. Some low energy systems may not be right, other configurations may do what is needed elegantly.
Right now, low energy office computing is practical. For instance there is the Wyse terminal server client product that I think burns around 35 watts with a display. Lashups like a gumstix, an LCD, a keyboard, and a mouse are almost office computers in the 5 to 20 watt range.