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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?"
Use server based VMs or terminal servers. Then use winterms for the desktops. You can get those for a couple a hundred dollars and they last forever.
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels.
I did this recently. Not with 1000 machines, mind you, but five. Dell wanted an exorbitant amount for the machines, insisted that since we were getting hex-core processors that we must get discrete graphics, and a bunch of other technologies* that we just didn't need.
By going with Newegg and building it myself over a weekend, the price was cut in a little more than half.
*We do scientific number crunching, but don't have any GPGPU code right now. Our codes fit in an average amount of memory, are CPU intensive, and take up very little hard-drive space. Dell couldn't understand selling us a hex-core CPU with a 80GB hard drive. Further, we couldn't specify the number of PCIE slots (in case we do GPGPU later on), but they did insist on discrete graphics, which we absolutely didn't need. This quote came from their SOHO line. On the true "server" side of things, their prices are astronomical.
I'd advise against it. We tried it where I worked. It sounds good to build your own boxes on the cheap, but it rarely works out like that. You build your own computers. The cards (ethernet, video, etc.) you used a few months might not be on sale this month, so you now have multiple versions of cards. If buying them in bulk, the line probably gets refreshed so it's hard to buy the same model of hardware twice. Then, when you have to rebuild an older computer a year or two later, you have to remember where you put those drivers for that particular card that this computer uses. Since it was bought on the cheap, it probably isn't marked very well and unless you had the luxury of looking at the computer before it went down, what model it is might not even be known. Even then, since the hardware was bought cheap, the drivers might not be as easy to get online as one would think, especially if the company isn't around anymore. There is also all sorts of tiny details dealing with this or that hardware that has to be remembered. Then you need storage for all the bits, parts, and driver software. Trying to call in hardware warrantees for the products you buy will usually be much more time consuming than just calling your vendor and having them do everything based on the serial number of the broken computer. In the end, building and maintaining our own computers was way more trouble and man hours than just going with a name brand such as HP or Dell and using their warrantees. Whatever got saved in material costs in building our own computers got more than spent in extra man hours maintaining them.
Dell has better volume discounts than you ever will, both with Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers. They further offset this by bundling in a whole load of crapware on the default OS install.
Even after accounting for their profit margin and your time spent re-imaging the machines with a clean version of Windows, the cost from Dell compared to DIY for standard beige-box business machines should be somewhere between slightly cheaper and slightly more expensive; if it's the latter, a single point of contact for warranty issues is still perhaps worth the money. If it's the former, you win on all counts.
If you are a large customer, Dell sends you a machine, you do a clean install, create a standard image with just the software you want on your machines, send the image to Dell, and they put it on all the machines you order from them. No bloat, no time wasted customizing each machine, and no extra charge for the service. Its especially nice if you have multiple locations and want to have a standard configuration used across the board.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
Our product is, technically, little more than a computer in a fancy box. We started off wanting to buy a small computer and shove it in, but found that we needed way more power than anything available at the correct form-factor.
Being computer guys, we figured we'd just build it ourselves.
Truth is, around here (Toronto), OEM computer suppliers are everywhere. Good ones (Infonec) with reasonable inventory and reasonable access, Poor ones (Tiger direct) with huge inventory and no access, and remote ones with infinite access and no inventory. So we're covered from every angle be it some rare component or an immediate same-day requirement.
Do components break? Sure. Some hardware is defective out of the box. That goes onto the reject shelf. Some break when we drop it. That goes into the garbage. Some break after they are installed when it's just not stable and it takes many hours to figure which part is at fault. Those are annoying, but they go onto the reject shelf just the same.
The reject shelf gets turned over by mail with a few RMA phone calls every few months. The nice part is that if you wait long enough, you tend to get newer models from the manufacturer, so it's winds up almost being worth-while.
The garbage is, honestly, an easy thing to avoid. Wear cotton, ground yourself, and never put a motherboard onto a chair unless you atcually want someone to sit on it.
The nice thing about 1'000 is that while you can't get much of a discount on the components themselves, you do get more than priority service from the suppliers. And that can really be valuable when it means that your deployment schedule is uninterupted.
Yes you can save money. You should wind up saving about 40% over a dell machine. Of course, you'll lose the warranty service. And that's where the trick comes in. You get to balance something that you've never balanced before.
You get to say: "cheaper = more servicing = more expensive" while also saying "higher quality = less servicing = still expensive"
Here's the trick: "higher quality = longer life-span = re-use"
The real savings aren't on those 40%, because you have to service them instead of dell servicing them. dell's more efficient (money wise) than you are. But because of that, dell's cost-optimizing the quality, because they don't get to keep it. They'd rather take the risk that the parts won't break, and fix the 20% that do.
That doesn't work for you.
You want to spend more, only saving 20%, then you want to do minor upgrades at the right now, so really only wind up saving 10%, then you want the machines to last twice as long, and be able to salvage the parts for future machines -- repeatedly. This also has service replacements of broken parts and diagnostic repair fed for free.
In the end, you wind up spending the same 100% out of the gate, you spend only 80% the second generation, and then you spend closer to 40% by the third generation.
In the end, you have high-quality machines, top-quality parts, and very few break. Service calls are not only at a minimum, but you're just swapping out the possibly bad parts with known-good parts, then checking the possible bad parts at a later, more convenient date.
You're also providing the new guy with a better computer to get him started on the right foot, you're giving the guy with a lot of work to do this week that extra gig of ram to make it easier.
But yes, this presumes that you are comfortable running such a service. It's definitely easy to do, but it's complicated as hell to keep it organized.
Building machines to sAve money ceased making sense about 4 years ago, like SpaghettiPattern, I build systems by choice, and fully understanding it likely cost more than a comprable Dell box. People that attempt to rationalize building PCs these days don't talk about savings, they talk about choosing the co potent to get a certain benefit (better PS, upgraded video card, better chassis). For basic office work, a business class PC should last five or more years without any failures. They would likely last longer, but there comes a point where a failure is almost certain to happen, and in most cases you want to avoid the unscheduled down-time, loss of the system.
PCs are a cutthroat business, and if you think you can do a better job than Dell's robots, fine, but I doubt you're right.
Ken
Well in our case (and I know it doesn't apply to the original poster), we use Linux, so that saved us even more, because getting Dell to drop Windows on a non-server build is like pulling teeth.
As for the time and pay, I got some overtime pay and got to play with some neat machines. It takes only 30 mins or so to actually build each box and I have our Linux as an image on a USB stick, so it takes another half an hour to copy the image over. All said and done, I probably only spent four hours putting the whole thing together.
I got lucky in that there were no defective parts, although one hard drive went bad about six months later. Other than that though, it's been 18 months since I did this and we haven't had any problems.
Of course, I wouldn't want to scale this process to 1000 machines, but with a little planning and foresight, it's definitely do-able in the tens of machines range.