Forum Moderators: phranque
I wanted to what other business are using as standards for their pc. We have the office suite, project and a few other progams but nothing that is a "hog" (asides from outlook and XP).
Thoughts?
Most of our machines here are therefore old PIII 833mhz (never needed to upgrade them) but they have been stuffed with 521mb of RAM and 40gig hard disks (that's big for what we do - most of the stuff we produce is Word document based).
Ours are Hewlett Packard which we've found, together with Compaq, may not be the quickest machines around, but we only have one crash about once a month, and usually that's because of a misbehaving app.
So I suppose our standard is low processor/video card speed, decent hard disk and plenty of RAM.
The big quality element from HP and Compaq I think is in the power supplies. I still have an old Compaq 386 here(!) which has been running permanently (never switched off) since 1996 and I've just connected to it over the network and it's still doing fine! Not sure what it's still doing there actually, lol.
TJ
do find plenty of hard disk space and RAM important
Agree totally with TJ. All of our workstations have at least 1 GB of RAM. Workstations are all RAID 1 (mirrored drives), with at least 80 GB of space. The programmers, especially the Java coders, need that RAM. I think you, as a project manager, will find it useful if you tend to multitask.
loaded XP on all the computers
IMHO, you'll be better off with Win2K. We actually went to WinXP for a short time, and then went (almost) immediately back to Win2K.
IMHO, you'll be better off with Win2K. We actually went to WinXP for a short time, and then went (almost) immediately back to Win2K.
Forgot to mention OS - we're also on Win2k as a result of bad experience with XP.
Win2k Professional is very good, and surprisingly stable for a Microsoft product.
TJ
Both XP and 2000 are stable platforms. My advice with either would be to learn a bit about them especially with regards to turning off services and the internet connection bandwidth that they reserve. XP uses this for the purposes of reporting errors to Microsoft. There are a lot of other services that need turning off and other "tweaks" that need to be applied, and you will have a very stable system.
Go with a 7200 hard disk, or a 10K rpm Raptor (currently available only in 36 GB). Use the 8 MB cache versions of whatever size you buy. I'd advise at least 512 MB of RAM but PLEASE do use some good quality, branded stuff. Make and model of motherboard is more important than small differences in processor speeds. The big names are Asus and Abit.
Businesses currently ordering PCs are going for processors from 2.0 GHz to 3.2 GHz, for RAM from 256 to 1024, for hard disks from 60 GB to 250 GB. Hope that helps.
