Desktop refresh best practice
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@Carnival-Boy said:
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.
Are they slower than they used to be? Or are they just starting to show up as being slower because people are doing heavier things?
Moving to Windows 10 and doing a fresh install should both help, a little.
Small things, like adding new RAM could go a really long way for cheap. What we did was go to SSDs on even older machines and the leap in performance was unreal. For under $150 per machine, maybe under $100, you might be able to up the memory and move to SSD, do the re-image as Windows 10 and see the machines easily double, or more, in end user delivered efficiency. And get many years of use yet out of the existing investment. Maybe three to four additional years.
Testing this on one or two machines would be cheap and easy.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
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 see you already thought of all of that
Generally the CPU is a tiny factor in overall performance for non-gaming systems. If they are manipulating massive spreadsheets or doing something really intensive there can be exceptions, but mostly CPUs are one of the least important factors in performance for desktops today so that the CPUs are old might matter almost not at all.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
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.
What would the specs of the "new" machines be? $450 is more than double the cost of the upgrade, but with additional support might be worth it. But you would be losing the tried and true reliability of the models you have today, so not a complete win. And double the money is still, double the money.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
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.Keep in mind that this is primarily a tech-driven business decision. There is more business in this decision than there is tech. So if you are looking to hire and IT decision maker, business skills outweight tech ones. But the best pure tech will often (as SW shows consistently) have no concept of how IT fits into the business context and will easily be lost and have no idea what decisions are wise ones or that favour the business.
So remember that IT as two big aspects - the IT people who make decisions and have to understand the business inside and out to do so, and the "button pushers" who can be extremely technical and incredibly good at what they do but are head down in technology and need the decision makers overseeing them or else they have no context in which to put their work and no ability to make reasonable recommendations, let alone decisions.
A good tech should be able to come up with some options. But understanding pricing, support value, financial factors, opex, capex, etc. are skills that the pure techs rarely have. So just be aware that this question is asking for a fair but of business understanding, not just technical understanding.
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I received an email from Tiger Direct this morning for $69 256 GB SSD (OCZ). You should be able to pickup a 128 for $50 or less and I would think the RAM would be around $100, so well below the $220 you mentioned.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
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?
I tend to be the opposite of most technical people here, partially because I was raised on the business side of the house, but I almost always lean towards rapid software updates and slow hardware updates. Software is where you get your security, stability and features and the costs of upgrading are generally extremely low. Hardware gets you most of your speed, but speed is rarely a primary issue today and is mostly not a business driver. Hardware is what costs the most. So saving money on hardware and spending it on software often gets you, by far, the most bang for your buck not just in good performing, easy to use end user systems but also in security, manageability and other soft factors that are extremely important to a business.
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@Dashrender said:
I received an email from Tiger Direct this morning for $69 256 GB SSD (OCZ). You should be able to pickup a 128 for $50 or less and I would think the RAM would be around $100, so well below the $220 you mentioned.
Sadly, UK prices are closer to Canadian than to American.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I received an email from Tiger Direct this morning for $69 256 GB SSD (OCZ). You should be able to pickup a 128 for $50 or less and I would think the RAM would be around $100, so well below the $220 you mentioned.
Sadly, UK prices are closer to Canadian than to American.
Aww.. I didn't put that together - you're right of course. Makes me wonder where he's getting a $400 machine then? and what kind of specs it has? Heck Chromebooks sometimes cost this much.
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@Dashrender said:
Aww.. I didn't put that together - you're right of course. Makes me wonder where he's getting a $400 machine then? and what kind of specs it has? Heck Chromebooks sometimes cost this much.
They CAN cost over a grand. But most cost $150 to $200.
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@scottalanmiller said:
So just be aware that this question is asking for a fair but of business understanding, not just technical understanding.
I am aware of that. But if they gave an answer like this (for example):
@scottalanmiller said:
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... Windows 10 is the third version update to the Windows Vista family post Windows 7.
then I would be impressed. But if their answer was "I always recommend waiting until the first service pack is released" then I might suspect that they are just following the (Spiceworks) crowd and don't particularly understand how modern Windows OSs work.
That said, I'm ultimately looking for someone who can eventually do my job better than I can (scary though that concept can be), and that includes making business decisions. 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.
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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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