Desktop refresh best practice
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The vast majority of the PCs in my organisation were purchased in 2011, so they're mostly 4 to 5 years old. They were fairly low-spec at the time - I believe most are HP Pro 3130's with Pentium G6950 2.8 GHz CPU and 3 GB RAM. All are Windows 7. They're pretty slow now. Some of them are performing like dogs for whatever reason. Obviously they're well out of warranty now, but hardly any have failed so they're very reliable.
I'm wondering what to do with them.
Firstly, as far as the OS is concerned, I'm considering rolling out Windows 10 company wide fairly soon. I note on Spiceworks that the consensus seems to be to stick with Windows 7 for at least another year. I can't quite understand this as 7 will be three versions behind and is over 5 years old. Also, I'm not sure if HP will continue shipping Windows 7 after July?
Secondly, as far as the hardware is concerned, I could upgrade the existing PCs with 8G RAM and SSDs for around $220. That, combined with re-installing the OS and moving to Windows 10 should result in drastically improved performance and they could be good for another few years. They'll still be using the same old Pentium processors though. I'm not expecting any reliability issues as in my experience, apart from hard drives (which will be replaced) HP PCs go on forever and I can easily replace the occasional faulty power supply.
Or I could buy new PCs. I like the look of the sexy new HP mini PCs for around $400 plus another $50 or so to increase the RAM from the measly 4GB that HP still ship as standard. I'm guessing they should perform better than our existing PCs.
Also, I'm interviewing at the moment for a new IT person and one of the interview questions is to find out what he or she would do, since this will be one of their first projects. But I don't know what is a good or bad answer to the question
- so I'm looking for feedback.tl;dr: When are you rolling out Windows 10? Why wouldn't you roll it out asap*? Is it better to replace PCs or upgrade them with new components?
(* we do have some DOS applications that some users run in XP mode which will be a problem with Windows 10.)
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I know this may be an unpopular opinion... but why are you boosting the RAM to 8GB other then it is fairly inexpensive to do so? Do you have applications that will take advantage of this extra RAM? Do you often see issues with lack of RAM?
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And for your DOS applications, have you tried to get them working in DosBox?
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I had a similar issue last year when XP was retired. The biggest difference was that I was going to have to purchase Windows Upgrade licenses as well as RAM and disk upgrades. While it would have been less than the cost of new machines most of my machines were 6+ years old, and several were showing signs of issues.
This is a really hard call. Considering the cost of going to new $450 vs upgrading, $220, I really want to lean toward buying new (after Windows 10 is released - you don't want to deploy Windows 7/8/8.1 only to replace it with Windows 10 in a few months).
But then there is Scott's argument of the time value of money. The cost of new is literally more than double the cost of upgrades. If you can get even two more years out of your current hardware you'll probably be financially ahead.
I guess I'd start by upgrading a few of the current machines to see if you are happy enough with the performance to continue using the machines for another few years. If you are, then I'd probably stick with the upgrades.
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@dafyre said:
And for your DOS applications, have you tried to get them working in DosBox?
Drat, I knew I forgot to address something.
I'm pretty sure XP Mode went away with the release of Windows 8 (you could use it with Windows 7, but not the newer OS's), so you'll need to find a solution for that.
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@dafyre said:
And for your DOS applications, have you tried to get them working in DosBox?
No, but I will. Thanks for the tip.
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@coliver said:
I know this may be an unpopular opinion... but why are you boosting the RAM to 8GB other then it is fairly inexpensive to do so? Do you have applications that will take advantage of this extra RAM? Do you often see issues with lack of RAM?
Not sure. I guess I'd have to test and find out. We do have quite a few users who use Autodesk Inventor View to view engineering drawings and that is fairly memory hungry, but apart from that, most users are just using Microsoft Office and IE. RAM is super cheap though, especially non-HP RAM.
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My personal opinion? I think this is one of the rare cases where updating the current hardware makes sense over going all new. It's a nice chunk of cost savings, and as you noted, those current HP's should certainly be worth another few years relatively problem-free. With Microsoft moving to OS's being upgradable, dropping the cash on new machines (only to go with Win10 in a fairly short amount of time) seems like a waste. Again, that's just my thoughts.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@coliver said:
I know this may be an unpopular opinion... but why are you boosting the RAM to 8GB other then it is fairly inexpensive to do so? Do you have applications that will take advantage of this extra RAM? Do you often see issues with lack of RAM?
Not sure. I guess I'd have to test and find out. We do have quite a few users who use Autodesk Inventor View to view engineering drawings and that is fairly memory hungry, but apart from that, most users are just using Microsoft Office and IE. RAM is super cheap though, especially non-HP RAM.
Has any determination been made as to what is causing the old machines to run slowly?
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No.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@coliver said:
I know this may be an unpopular opinion... but why are you boosting the RAM to 8GB other then it is fairly inexpensive to do so? Do you have applications that will take advantage of this extra RAM? Do you often see issues with lack of RAM?
Not sure. I guess I'd have to test and find out. We do have quite a few users who use Autodesk Inventor View to view engineering drawings and that is fairly memory hungry, but apart from that, most users are just using Microsoft Office and IE. RAM is super cheap though, especially non-HP RAM.
Ah, yes that is a hungry app. Although I have a 2GB machine (long story) running it in our shop right now without too much issue. I think you would be very surprised at the performance increases in just upgrading the HDD to an SSD.
@art_of_shred has a good point. If you can figure out what is causing that issue you may be able to get even more life out of the machine by updating that.
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While we are a very long time away from when Windows 9x was living, I wonder if a simple OS refresh would help, not solve the issue for the moment.
It seemed to me at least with Windows 9x that it's disk use exploded over time, and that once a year I did a refresh on it to eliminate that bloat. This sped the machine back up to a nice performance level.
fast forward nearly 20 years
That isn't to say that this is the fix. It is at best a band-aid for a larger problem. Available funding is always a issue. I don't see how spending $200 in upgrades this year, and $500 in replacement next year is practical. The total cost of that system becomes $700 plus it's original purchase price. If you spent $700 and get 5 years out of them, why spend $700 for just two years - is that a good ROI?
And don't forget to factor your time to upgrade and refresh each one of those stations. How much of your time would be spent on the in place upgrade (End User Desk) or Bench side and the round trip from the desk to bench.
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Not sure I follow your maths there. But let's say a new PC cost $500. If I'm planning on retiring PCs after 5 years, that's a capitalised cost of $100 per year. So if I can spend an extra $200 and get an extra 2 years then I have broken even: my PC costs remain $100 per year.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Not sure I follow your maths there. But let's say a new PC cost $500. If I'm planning on retiring PCs after 5 years, that's a capitalized cost of $100 per year. So if I can spend an extra $200 and get an extra 2 years then I have broken even: my PC costs remain $100 per year.
That is true - But what about your time? Yes the physical cost is still just $100 a year, but what about YOUR cost? Time spent on installing those upgrades?
Original Cost: $500
Device Life cycle: 5 years
Upgrade cost: $200
Upgrade time: 1.5 hours
Upgrade time Cost: 1.5 x $100hr
Additional Cost: $150
Total Upgrade: $350
Two year Life Cycle cost: $175/yrOf course - in the Non Profit arena I have been in the last nine years, that two year extension normally works out to be nearly four years.
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@g.jacobse said:
...that two year extension normally works out to be nearly four years.
This is where I was going - two years was a bare expected minimum for additional life. I would fully expect most of those machines to give another four years or more.
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@Dashrender said:
I would fully expect most of those machines to give another four years or more.
Agreed.
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I would just replace them. The ram is going to be a bottle neck and maybe even the CPU as its fairly low end. I'd just buy standard machines all with 8GB of ram, and a core i5 for future proof.
One you count their age, the cost of upgrades and your cost for doing the upgrades it is not worth it, especially on these very low end systems.
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Also as far as Windows 10, most people on spiceworks work in the SMB market and are very scared of technology. There's no reason to just stay on windows 7 for another year unless you have to. We plan on having all 8,000 of ours on windows 10 in 6 months.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Firstly, as far as the OS is concerned, I'm considering rolling out Windows 10 company wide fairly soon. I note on Spiceworks that the consensus seems to be to stick with Windows 7 for at least another year. I can't quite understand this as 7 will be three versions behind and is over 5 years old. Also, I'm not sure if HP will continue shipping Windows 7 after July?
I don't agree with the SW consensus at all and often point to their reaction in this matter as a point of why most IT people completely misunderstand software maturity. Windows 10 is essentially a "patch" to Windows 7, they are the same OS (Vista is the base of the family of which they are all members.) Windows 10, even as an upgrade patch, is heavily tested already (we moved to it six months ago!!) Windows 7 isn't just old in general (really, really old by IT standards, finding Windows 7 in business use today should be just slightly surprising, seven years old is ancient in IT terms, few OSes have ever been considered even slightly acceptable at that age, XP being one of them) but it is a very immature member of the family. Windows 10 is the third version update to the Windows Vista family post Windows 7.
Other than issues like you mentioned with compatibility for XP mode, I can't fathom any logic of not going to Windows 10. Both previous versions of Windows in between were both faster and more stable than Windows 7. And, of course, new security measures being included and, not to mention, new features that may or may not be useful to your users.
Windows 10 is expected to be even yet more stable than its predecessors, faster and lighter and have even more features. A great way to get more life out of your older systems.
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Well one reason to not upgrade is the manpower it takes to do the actual upgrade. But beyond application compatibility and the upgrade manpower (and associated costs) I agree, I see no reason not to upgrade.
Though I suppose the usual end user training might be another reason not to. Give users a chance to get it at home first.. learn on their own dime/time. Then after they are more familiar with it, then roll it out to the office environment.
That said I'm with @thecreativeone91 I hope management signs off on us upgrading before the end of the year.
