New Desktops
<Geek warning>
I promise this won’t be a deep and involved geek post, but our business has existed on a mix of machines since it’s inception in 2000. Many of these are old Pentium III IBM machines, (which probably cost a fortune) using Windows NT4 and 15″ CRT monitors, etc. Granted as we’ve grown we have added some Windows 2000 and Windows XP machines, but the bulk of the business is on these NT units.
As we have had a pretty good year we decided it was time to update these machines and whilst we put out the quote, we ended up with Dell.
The units are basic workstations with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13Ghz processors (please hum the trademark tune please!), midi towers, 1gb ram, 160gb hard drives, LAN card, 17″ flat-panel monitor (and that is ‘sexy’, with tilt in every direction, including rotate to plug the cables in! It has a USB ‘in’ plug and cable to power 4 screen mounted USB connections, which saves crawling under the desk!). There is onboard sound and granted no DVD/CD but these are just network workstations. They are supplied with Office Basic 2007 (Excel, Outlook and Word) and Windows XP SP2.
All up these units were £479.99 each. (The Office pack alone is probably £150). They joined the domain (a Windows 2003 Small Business Server) at a snip and in just half a day we had configured and installed 10 of the 20 units. Every user was delighted!
Now, for home you would probably want speakers and DVD/CD, but these would be about £30 all up. It makes me wonder whether it would be as well to forego all the razzmatazz of a ‘top of the range’ unit at home and just buy one like this every year!
Now my new business laptop arrives this week from Dell also, so it’ll be interesting how that goes.
My only issue is having the majority of the business on Office 2007, which should get me busy!
</Geek warning>
June 25th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
Think the Geek warning should have been bigger – lost the will to live before the end !
June 25th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
I did put the geek warning though. There’s tons of that on my other site so I try and keep it low here…sorry!
June 26th, 2007 at 1:24 am
This was interesting — you want to see geeky, read this post by a Canadian MVP:
http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2007/06/02/introducing-the-new-vista-ipod.aspx
Yes, he named his baby Vista.
June 26th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
Canadian MVPs…who’d have them! I knew you lot were a bit zany at the last summit, but wow! Is he serious?
June 27th, 2007 at 2:30 am
Zany or no, I’d hardly say that it’s any more off-the-wall than the family that named their kid Google back in 2005. At least Vista sounds more human than that!
June 27th, 2007 at 7:54 am
And did you see the NZ couple who were banned from calling their son 4Real as there is a ban on ‘Christian’ names starting with a number!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_6230000/newsid_6231100/6231184.stm?bw=bb&mp=wm
June 25th, 2008 at 6:50 am
[...] it will be clear to all over the next few days I’m sure. Interestingly, exactly a year ago, I was eulogising about the machines arriving at the office from the same [...]