Desktop refresh best practice
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@Carnival-Boy said:
If people just want to be techs and not have any business understanding (and there are many like that), then I normally suggest they'd be better off in larger organisations.
I've seen them used in a lot of small shops too. Maybe that isn't wise. But if you have one decision maker and two tech-onlies in a three person shop, you can make it in the SMB. But much smaller than that you would be in a pretty untenable position.
Anyplace that can dedicate someone to a helpdesk, NOC or end user support (oh, let me show you how to use Excel efficiently...) role you can do fine, IMHO, without that business context. But you can't be too small and do that.
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@scottalanmiller said:
What would the specs of the "new" machines be?
I dunno. I normally just buy whatever HP's budget professional Intel desktops are. But I do like the look of these (from a purely aesthetic point of view, I don't know if they are ok spec wise?):
http://www.misco.co.uk/product/2460294/I'm a sucker for anything small. Which might be alien to you Americans as you tend to like everything big, don't you?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I'm a sucker for anything small.
Me too, I love ultra small form factor machines.
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That's a nice little unit. The CPU is terribly low end, not sure you are going to see any performance difference there. Memory you said you would upgrade to 8GB for $50 or whatever, so that is fine.
Only big thing is, that's a 7200 RPM desktop drive. That's horrible. That will make this unit slower than my 2009 low end HP desktop that I have now that has 6GB and an SSD and an ancient triple core AMD Phenom processor.
If these were coming with SSDs, yeah, they would be faster (somewhat) but without an SSD, I would consider this the weaker of the two hardware options - and at double the price. If I was one of your end users, I would prefer the old machine being faster to this new one being slow.
Also, worth noting, these are low end one year warranty machines not the three year standard. That's fine, but an important note that the value of the warranty is tiny. Especially as buying memory and SSDs for the old boxes would likely get you a much better warranty on those parts.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Only big thing is, that's a 7200 RPM desktop drive. That's horrible.
Pretty much all HP desktops come with 7200 SATA drives, I think? Even their workstations, which I find pretty annoying.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Only big thing is, that's a 7200 RPM desktop drive. That's horrible.
Pretty much all HP desktops come with 7200 SATA drives, I think? Even their workstations, which I find pretty annoying.
Yes, it often stops us from buying new because there is no value to it.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
I'm a sucker for anything small.
Me too, I love ultra small form factor machines.
I hate them. Rather have a full size tower any day.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Only big thing is, that's a 7200 RPM desktop drive. That's horrible.
Pretty much all HP desktops come with 7200 SATA drives, I think? Even their workstations, which I find pretty annoying.
SSDs where a CTO option even back when I bought my HP z800. Which is a machine from 2011 that will run circles around most even modern computers. I had a 256gb sdd put in mine. (plus 6x 1TB enterprise drives)
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CTO?
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and CTO's always cost a mint also!
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Yeah, you lose all the cost advantage of the cheap, small machines when going that route, sadly.
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Definitely better off buying the new machine and replacing the drive yourself (heck probably better off adding more RAM yourself too).
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@Dashrender said:
Definitely better off buying the new machine and replacing the drive yourself (heck probably better off adding more RAM yourself too).
And doing that is what led us to buy used instead of new in many cases. Once we have to open the cases and modify them, might as well start off cheap
We get even cheaper by getting machines with no hard drives at all that most people don't want to touch. -
So normally when flattening and doing a fresh OS re-install on and old PC I will purchase a single Windows volume licence and use that multiple times because a single volume licence gives you rights to install on multiple PCs if those PCs have an OEM licence, right?
But what is the situation with the free Windows 10 deal? Will the same work? Or will I have to install Windows 8.1 and then do an upgrade via WSUS? Which will probably be fine, but is a bit time-consuming, I suspect.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
So normally when flattening and doing a fresh OS re-install on and old PC I will purchase a single Windows volume licence and use that multiple times because a single volume licence gives you rights to install on multiple PCs if those PCs have an OEM licence, right?
It gives you imaging rights. So you have the right to use the VL license and a single image on all machines where you would have had the rights to put that OS manually.
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I'm curious though.. at what point do you have a Windows 10 license?
Just because you have a Windows 7/8/8.1 license doesn't automatically make it a Windows 10 license, otherwise there would be no point in having the 1 year BS confusion they have.
So you have a bunch of corporately controlled Windows 7/8/8.1 machines - how do you upgrade the license? Do we have to install Windows Pro, then register with our MS ID, then we'll get the upgrade tied to both the computer and presumably our MS ID, then we can wipe that and deploy Windows 10 using the VL media? What a pain! That's doable for probably up to 20 machines, but much past that and you'll living in a nightmare!
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Good question, @Dashrender I have no idea either. I wonder too.
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I think the entire SMB world is waiting for this answer.
Sadly I think the Windows 10 upgrade is going to be exactly like Office Product Key Cards. When you purchased this key card you associated it with your MS account. Then if you needed to reinstall it, you would have to pick a key from those available in your account. This did not work for tiny offices - I had a client who decided to go the cheep route, I was able to associate all 10 of their PKCs with a single MS account, but when looking at the keys through their portal, there was no way to know which was installed on which machine.
I hope that the machine itself somehow generates a unique ID that MS logs that has nothing to do with an MS ID so this machine can pass from user to user without issues.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Yeah, you lose all the cost advantage of the cheap, small machines when going that route, sadly.
Depends if your order size is less than 50-100 then yes. But when you are ordering 100-300 computers at a time all they will get the CTO costs next to nothing for you, many times much cheaper than the original config cost would be. There's something to be said for have just a few different model computers (Based on the phase of the refresh cycle) and having next day replacement warranties.
