US State Dept. Loses Anti-Terrorist Program Laptops

Stony Stevenson writes "It has surfaced that the US State Department can't account for up to about 1,000 laptops, perhaps as many as 400 of which belonged to the department's Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program. Internal auditors found that the department lost track of $30 million worth of computer equipment, 'the vast majority of which... perhaps as much as 99 percent,' were laptops, according to one official. Another official calculated that the average State Department laptop costs US$3,000 and figured that meant as many as 1,000 laptops might be astray — not 10,000 laptops as the US$30 million figure suggests. They're obviously not very good at maths."

Comments

Re:$3000 for a laptop??

[mcmonkey]

I presume that price includes software, created by government contractors at high price for a specific purpose, divided amongst the few thousand computers that have it installed.

Software would be a part of the purchase price, but not the calculation of the value of the lost property.

After all, software is licensed not bought. When a computer gets lost, they still have the license, right? It's not like they have repurchase the same software for the replacement computers.

They were found yesterday

[bloody_liberal]

At least according to this website: http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=hsnews-000002717866

Re:$3000 for a laptop??

[AK Marc]

A state department laptop costs an average of $3000? That's completely insane! No (non-gaming) laptop costs that much unless you're just trying to burn money.

Ok, buy a laptop. Put the most popular business OS on it. Put the most popular business office suite on it. Put "standard" software on it, Acrobat, virus scanner, CALs for email, SQL, and such. Now look at the cost. Having bought a number of computers for companies, the hardware costs $500-$1000 for the desktop, and $2000+ after all the software. And yes, they essentially throw out all the licenses when they get rid of the computer, but by then the software is usally obsolete as well. Not to mention that a laptop order here is usually for someone "special" with special needs. With the cost of the one laptop was an extra battery, an extra charger, a monitor, a stand, a dock, a case, a mouse, a keyboard (invariably wireless) and sometimes even things like printers. The "laptop" was half accessories or more.

So when they "cost" $3000, that's probably not the cost of the hardware laptop only, but includes other expenses.