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Generic PCs For Corporate Use?
porkThreeWays writes "I work for a government agency supporting about 1000 PCs. The economy has hit us just like everyone else and we are looking at ways to save money. We currently buy Dell computers and even with our government discounts end up spending about $1,000 for a pretty mediocre computer. I had the idea of building our own PCs for considerably less. We'd spec out a standard configuration that we'd use for 18 months. CPU speeds and RAM sizes may change during that time, but socket types, memory standards, hard drive interfaces standards, etc, etc would be required to stay the same. We have Dell warranties right now, but I could see just keeping spare parts on the shelf and building that into the cost of the PC. We'd also be able to transfer Windows licenses because the Dell installs are non-transferable. However, I couldn't find anyone on the large scale doing this. Is anyone on Slashdot using PCs they built themselves on the large scale?"
I had the idea of building our own PCs for considerably less.
This is an awful idea. I had some experience with such an experiment; it didn't work. The computers were failing left and right, and the vendor distanced itself from the situaton. You will first be forced to maintain all that herd, and eventually you will become a scapegoat.
Business is all about using money to make other money. It is a legitimate expense to buy a computer; it's tax-deductible on corporate level, so you don't need to squint too hard at the prices. Buy good computers with a warranty and on-site support and be happy.
^^this, I to have tried it, it just doesn't work, despite what people think dell are working on low margins but making it up with high volume. There are so many hidden costs to building and maintaining your own fleet. I worked at place that had the same idea and by coincidence it was dells we were thinking were over priced, we built and supported our own only to find out after 3 years that the average price ended up being almost 20% higher than dell even though initial costs were cheaper.
I know a local fortune 500 company that tried this at one of their two buildings here at their corporate campus a couple years ago. Well, they are back to a desktop at every cubical now because they found if something happened, like a switch went down, suddenly all 100 - 200 terminals on that floor was down and no one could do anything until it was back up. With desktops, they may not be able answer emails, but they could at least still use office and get something accomplished if the network went down. You take 100 employs making 20/hr sitting and doing nothing for 2 - 3 hours and you've bought yourself the cost of the PC's.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I think the answer might just be to try renegotiating your price or specs. I also work for a government institution with about 1000 computers and we pay about $450 with Dell for what I would consider a very decent desktop computer (4GB of RAM, Intel Core 2, etc.).
Volume licenses for large corporates are about the same as OEM, so no problem there. As for hardware? stick with bog standard and Windows 7 (or any other Windows for that matter) won't say a peep. I did a 30 box rollout for an SMB that way, and last I heard they are happy as clams. I'd suggest AMD as Intel has been socket hopping too much lately, whereas AMD is backwards compatible. But you get a bog standard business class AMD motherboard (I've had good luck with ECS Business) and the ONLY thing that ever changes on those things is the GPU. The sound is all Realtek high def, the NICs are all Realtek too, the north and south bridge AMD. The worst you might have is windows asking to re-run WGA, which takes seconds on any real network, but I've frankly not seen it on the ones where I used bog standard business class. That is one of the nice thing about AMD Business class motherboards, I can carry the latest drivers for just about every board they current sell on a little thumbstick with space left over. There simply isn't much variation.
As for TFA? Go 5-10% over for spares and you'll be fine. If it is 1000 seats I'd want 50 spares just to cover Murphy's Law and to allow for expansion. Go with bog standard AMD dual core kits and you can pick up the hardware for less than $300 at someplace like Tigerdirect (hell last week they were selling AMD quads with 2Gb of RAM for $269) and your MSFT volume license will take care of the OS. Just make a disc image with the standard apps your place uses and you're good to go. I'm sure you have volume licenses for it so no worries, and by DIY you KNOW what is going into the PC. I've had bad luck with the lower model Dells really skimping on parts like caps. Better to get a board with good solid state caps that will really last. The ones I built cost $575 with 17 inch monitors and can be upgraded to a quad with 16Gb of RAM if someone has higher needs than the average office Joe. For a dual core with quality parts and 2Gb of RAM apiece it was really quite reasonable IMHO.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
- You need to have some very frank discussions with either your Dell rep, or whomever is speccing out your quotes. $1k for corporate-level desktop PC in this day and age is ridiculous; you should be expecting to pay more like $600-700. To give you an idea, I work for a state university, and we're currently giving about $550 for a Core2 E8400/4Gig Ram/160gig HD HP. Integrated video and no monitor of course, but a 3 year warranty. Sure you're not going to be decoding the human genome with that machine but it's more than enough for your average office worker. Don't be afraid to use HP as a club against your Dell rep; they're currently getting hammered by HP in the corporate world, and won't want to lose your account, assuming you're of any kind of size. I wouldn't recommend going to HP unless you absolutely have to though; service is horrible.
- Take some time to consider whether the time spent building custom machines is really worth the time of whomever would be doing it. Chances are, it is not. Either you're going to have someone making peanuts doing the work, or a skilled IT person who really isn't all that interested in doing what essentially is grunt work. In either case, you're going to see problems.
- If you haven't already, you should discuss this with your purchasing department before moving forward. Depending on the level of beauracracy that is entrenched in your level of government, building your own computers may not even be permissable.
You mentioned that you couldn't find anyone doing this on a large scale, this should be a warning flag. Lot of potential problems and pitfalls here, not the least of which is your cunning "transfer the OEM licenses" plan. There are a lot of better ways to save money on computer purchases.
This is the correct answer. Seriously, don't even consider 1,000 hand built computers.
Buying 1,000 desktops should give you a lot of leverage. First thing you should be doing is getting bids from HP and IBM as well as Dell. But I'd have thought three quotes would already be a bare minimum in your corporate requirements. Remember and add a service deal. At $1,000 per PC, I'd be expect a four year maintenance deal with next day or even same day on site service.
Your thought was to have a standard configuration that would last 18 months. Well desktops should be able to run for four years, plenty of businesses are doing that already, and those Dell computers now have a lifespan 2.66 times that of your computers with Dell supporting the hardware for the duration.
If you have onsite tech staff, you should also be able to bypass technical support and simply declare parts as failed and have replacements shipped out. If you don't have staff that can support that, you should at least get priority business support that gets you a knowledgeable tech and a guaranteed fast answer time.
I agree with everyone saying "don't do it".
I used to work as an engineer for one of the top US computer makers. Most people have no idea how much testing the big computer makes put into integrating their systems.
Say we wanted to support shipping 3 different sizes memory sticks from 2 different vendors. We would test every possible permutation of size and vendor in loading the memory slots. The test systems were run in an environmental chamber where we ramped the temperature from the minimum to the maximum operating ranges. We also ramped the power supply from -10% to +10% of specification.
Say one of the disk drive vendors wanted us to qualify a new capacity disk drive. That too took a similar amount of testing; racks full of computers reading and writing to the disks while in the environmental chamber.
This testing *did* uncover problems frequently. We would discover that (for example) we couldn't use a certain Hitachi memory stick with a certain Samsung memory stick if the temperature rose past a certain point. We would find that a specific Western Digital drive had errors under certain conditions with a LSI controller but no problems with an Adaptec controller.
The point of all this is that there is just no way that a small shop is going to have the resources that a major computer maker does to test their integration. There is more to successful system integration then just grabbing a bunch of off-the-shelf components.
I had the idea of building our own PCs for considerably less.
Dell in its prime was absorbing the entire annual output of its Asian OEMs. When there was a dock strike in L.A. it hired fleets of air cargo planes to maintain just-in-time production lines.
Parts are cheap when you purchase them in the millions.
If you assemble and maintain your PCs in-house, you will have to pay US wages and benefits. You will need to maintain parts in inventory. You will need to hire someone to keep your home-brewed systems in repair. All of this costs money.