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Benchmark Software For Windows 7 Rollout?
tdisalvo writes "We are doing a Windows 7 rollout and I will have to compare major PC vendors. I am looking for vendor-neutral tests that will give me the data I need to present an educated opinion to my CIO. Clear, pretty charts are nice since it is for C level execs, and we need to make it understandable for nontechnical as well as technical people. More specifically, I am looking for something that will clearly show how the same processor performs (better or worse) with a particular build, motherboard, RAM, power supply, etc. My plan is to get very similar machines from major vendors and see which one's build has the highest independent benchmarks. Something with which I could test multiple computers and report on the differences in score would be ideal."
As usual, free is an advantage.
Is this really necessary for a Windows 7 rollout with corporate desktops? Most machines are already overpowered for the average user using Office and what not.
I'd think the cost per machine for good 3-4 year warranties would be more important. At least, it has been in my experience.
I could see doing something like this just for developer machines, but general roll-out? I dunno. Seems like you'd just compare pricing and go with the one that makes the most budget sense.
You haven't said what you actually do with these computers. The relevant benchmarks should look like your actual workflow, otherwise you are just drag racing.
Questions:
A. Do have the authority to make the decision?
B. Are you tasked with giving him your "expert opinion" on the matter?
C. Are you tasked to actually educate him enough about a technical decision that he has no technical skills to currently evaluate an answer?
Answers:
A. Evaluate on the specs you know are important on the job, give him a specific brand, and say "trust me, buy these"
B. Evaluate on the specs you know are important on the job, give him a specific brand, and say "trust me, buy these"
C. You're boned.
Why should C-level execs care about what model processor is used in their computers? Office users aren't looking for the absolute greatest performance, they're looking for reliability, manageability, and cost. I can guarantee that no typical* medium or large size business will make a decision on which vendor to use for office computers based on the performance benchmarks. Frankly, who gives a shit about the motherboard in a typical office user's computer. It doesn't matter, certainly not to upper management. Choose something that has a reasonable cost, a solid long term support contract, and is easy to manage in your existing environment. If anything, the support contract, expandability (adding dual monitors later, or adding more memory for heavy data analysts or future software upgrades), and the existing vendor relationships are far more important than performance benchmarks. *Assuming they're not using them to render lots of graphics or do other very specific, specialized tasks.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Performance? Really? Personally I'd want stability, reliability, and top notch support. Your average computer user loses far more productivity from downtime due to cheap hardware dying, unstable drivers, etc than to their machine starting (insert app of your choice) .2 seconds slower. I want to be able to order an exact replacement 2 years down the road if a machine dies. I want replacement parts available for the forseeable lifetime of the machines on which I standardize.
You forgot to mention what kind of workload you're needing the machines for. A machine used for CAD or FEM used in construction or achitecture will have very different requirements from a database-heavy stand-alone machine that might get used for human resources or controlling.
What business are you in?
That said, for most applications or average office users, terminal services plus thin clients are the way to go. It may look similarily expensive compared to individual PCs at the first look but if you have/are a capable Windows admin, your business is gonna save hugely on deployment and management costs.
That's the number you want to present to your CIO.
Not only were the machines similar they were virtually identical. Unless you were looking at the case badge, or the PCI vendor strings, you would have been hard-pressed to tell which was which. Same intel silicon, very similar HDDs and optical drives(not that that really mattered, neither party was willing to quote anything other than a capacity, so the brands we got in the test boxes were assurances of nothing). The RAM was within spitting distance of one another and(again), the vendors would assure us of nothing other than "X capacity, verified compatible) so it wasn't as though the specifics of the test samples told us much.
We ended up going with Dell, just because they were cheaper, their driver download pages are modestly less unpleasant, and their "ImageDirect" tool is actually pretty handy.
Unless you have particular reason to believe otherwise, exhaustive benchmarking will be a waste of your, and the exec's time. The only exception that I can think of would be if you were advocating for something unusual but potentially interesting(ie. Most corporate desktops are brutally I/O bound, straining under the load of A/V, constant patches and updates, and so forth. SSDs would make them fly, comparatively. Particularly if your company actually has a lot of expensive people running around, a "number of minutes from cold boot to productivity" benchmark could be eye-opening.)
What a waste of time and effort. Firstly some machines will perform better on some benchmarks than others. Secondly there are costs, availability, configuration, reliability and many other factors to evaluate. Its hard to believe you are going to look at a few percent performance differences (if that much). After all, PCs are practically the definition of a commodity market. You might be better off picking the machines with the best paint jobs. You ought to get a job at the Pentagon where they specialize in meaningless power point slides.
There's no business/office productivity software that requires Vista or Windows 7. In fact, I'm not aware of any software of any kind that REQUIRES Windows 7.
You can run everything on XP.
Now ask yourself: "Why are we spending -any- money on upgrades?"
Two paths from this point.
1) Slap yourself, rebuild your corporate image with a nice current minimal build and give users the option to rebuild their machines with said image dynamically, at boot time. This will produce vastly greater productivity than any attempt to upgrade.
OR
2) Continue on your current path to justify your continued employment and claim Windows 7 is necessary and the upgrade is "a must have" to remain competitive.
In no test, on the same hardware, will you see any performance increases, by any time based measurement when comparing Windows XP SP3 vs. Windows 7. Windows 7 will always be slower. Boot time, shutdown time, application launch time, or install time. All slower. And you don't have to take my word for it, break out your stopwatch, you can see it for yourself.
Yeah I have to agree with this, came here to say the same thing. Benchmarks have their uses, but chances are the real world difference between similarly-built machines is not going to be significant. Let's be honest here: Unless you're doing a roll-out to a bunch of coders or CIA Photoshop experts, chances are most of these PC's are going to be running a web browser, a groupware client, and a document/spreadsheet editor like 75% of the time.
Choosing a PC vendor based on price, reliability, and service is going to be far more useful and have a far greater RIO than picking the one that scored 5 points higher on 3DMark or whatever. There have to be much better uses of your time.
I hope you were merely tasked with finding benchmarks and that you're just a tech. If your CIO tasked you with picking the next platform and you decided to perform technical benchmarks, then you really missed the boat.
1. First, you need to be analyzing support you'll get. Don't get too hung up on it, but you need something better than a 90-day warranty. There are diminishing returns though, at some point it's not worth getting a 3 year or 4 year contract.
2. Next, you need a vendor that will help you with license management. Being able to audit your licenses for Office or Symantec or whatever quickly will help you. If you don't have volume licensing, now is the time your vendor should be helping you with it.
3. Usability matters a lot, but what matters almost as much is how cool your laptops are. When your marketing director, you know, the one that always wears cool clothes and would have to have his iPhone pried out of his cold dead hands, goes to a conference you better make sure he has the coolest laptop of any of the other marketing geeks. A lot of companies overlook this, but I guarantee you he doesn't want to be carrying around a Latitude E6510 clunker.
4. There's a nice price point right now around $1000 for decent corporate laptops and you'll get about 3 years out of them.
5. You need to be negotiating with your sales rep hard if you're making a purchase like this. Your rep isn't going to be able to make huge discounts on laptops like they can on server equipment or some software licenses, so see if you can get some killer pricing on servers while you're shopping for a big laptop package.
Skip the benchmarks, it's not worth your time. Anything you teach your boss about Core duo, i5, etc will be useless knowledge for him in six months when Intel introduces some new spec.
----- obSig
Performance benchmarks for typical desktop office machines are pointless. What is FAR more important is: driver stability/support and vendor support in the case of hardware malfunction. So long as your desktops have > 1gb ram they will be fine for 7, for normal office use.
We're currently a dell shop (sigh), my baseline cut-off for Dell laptops is Latitude D510 with 1GB ram for Win7 pro x86. Desktop machines - anything with similar spec to that is fine for x86.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.