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11-23-2005
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#2 |
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Furious Forest Fawn
Joined: Mar 2005
Posts: 23
vCash: 1000
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I see you're buying cheapo videocards. Have you considered a motherboard with onboard video to drop the cost? The ASUS A8V-MX is around $62.00.
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11-23-2005
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#3 |
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Executive Vice President of Moderation
Joined: Nov 2001
Party: Independent
Posts: 2,339
vCash: 1000
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If you don't specifically need to tinker with them yourself, you're honestly probably better off getting a Dell or whatever with a service contract.
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11-23-2005
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#4 | |
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<This space for rent>
Joined: Aug 2004
Posts: 509
vCash: 1000
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Quote:
Dell is a good option, I've always used IBM. The point being, it's not the hardware that costs a lot. It's the downtime and hassle that is created when one of them has a failure. |
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11-23-2005
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#5 | |
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Administrator
Joined: Jan 2001
Location: Atlanta
Party: Independent
Posts: 7,685
vCash: 900
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Quote:
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11-23-2005
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#6 |
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Insufferable Old Fool
Joined: Jun 2001
Location: Hell
Posts: 108
vCash: 1000
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I suggested they go with pre-built and they really didn't like the idea. They would rather just have me fix them at an hourly rate. I think they have had bad experiences with Dell in the past.
__________________
Arisensun Jaegermeister Vallis Aspectus Ayonae Ro "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth." |
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11-23-2005
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#7 | |
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No Title Chosen
Joined: Dec 2002
Location: Bank One Ballpark
Posts: 1,728
vCash: 1000
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This is where you need to explain to them that they *should* be buying a Dell, and that youre experience is what they pay you for and that you know they're better off with an Optiplex 620.
It's completely STUPID to build a bunch of grey-box workstations for a small business like this. The home version come in for <600 a box, including monitor, which is $300 cheaper and includes $100 worth of OS that you're not including in your price, as well as a better hardware warranty than you're going to be able to give them with your mix-and-match mail-order. Quote:
Is this going to run a domain for 4 workstations? Do you need one? Does a simple $300 NAS device with simple authentication solve all of their needs? Even if it doesn't, if the box isn't running an application or a database, it just needs fast drives and healthy memory. That's it. End of story. Hand-customize their Dells. Set a purchasing standard for them. Buy them what they need, and be more to them then a guy who puts cool computers together in Lian-Li cases. FOUR DELL WORKSTATIONS AND A NAS + PRINT SERVER |
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11-23-2005
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#8 |
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Executive Vice President of Moderation
Joined: Nov 2001
Party: Independent
Posts: 2,339
vCash: 1000
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In as much I want to punch Pali in the face for the bright red text, I generally have to agree with him.
Long ago in ages past when men were men and cut their hands often on AT minitowers, we used to have a good relationship with a local Vietkoreanese place that would assemble decent clones for us at better than Dell/IBM/DECpaq prices and usually tossed in a few spare parts for us to maintain them with before they got out here for repairs. That time is over now, and it comes down to the major distributors having been forced to become price competitive as well as abandoning most of their stupid Not-Integrated-Here mentality regarding peripherals. It's just not worth it anymore to maintain the machines yourself and most of the Asian chop shops are gone now. The cost of machines dropped below the cost of people's time. People will sell you a plug-n-play Linux server appliance with basic RAID for less than the cost of the server hardware probably, too. If they're absolutely stuck on you doing it, I'd look at reducing the video card on everything and getting some sort of SATA or SCSI raid setup for disk mirroring, since you don't seem to have any sort of backup system. There is also no reason for getting a bigger processor on the server unless it's running multiple relational databases or whatever either. Software inefficiency and disk access time are going to be your only performance limitations. |
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11-23-2005
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#9 | |
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No Title Chosen
Joined: Dec 2002
Location: Bank One Ballpark
Posts: 1,728
vCash: 1000
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Quote:
 More about the NAS/appliance solution. Seriously, look into it. Good ones even provide some application support (webserver, FTP server). First google hit gets you something like this: http://www.adstech.com/products/NAS-...pid=NAS-806-EF If you feel like earning a few bucks, customize a Linksys NSLU2 with homebrew firmware. http://www.nslu2-linux.org/ |
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11-23-2005
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#10 |
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Resident Angry Veteran
Joined: Jan 2003
Location: The North Pole
Party: Independent
Posts: 1,133
vCash: 1000
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Just bought a couple dells for my new job, good pricing on their home machines, I would suggest against their "Business" Machines if you're trying to keep it cheap. Many of them have the monitor included in the price. I got my Dimension 3000 with 17in flat panel (analog) XP Pro, and Office 2003 Basic for just over ~ $850
If you really *really* want a server still I'd still get one of their cheaper servers. Go with a namebrand because then you only have one place to go if you need warantee work. *Edit* Check their "Hot Offers" some good deals in there |
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