So, faced with having to purchase new workstations for our non-profit staff, I’ve decided to hold off on purchases for two more years. Savings? Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Is it smart? We are hoping that Dell’s Technical Support will allow us to hold off on another major purchase of workstations. So… for about 7.5% of the yearly lease cost of 75 workstations we can basically not buy any new machines until 2009. These are decent workstations — Pentium IVs on fairly new mobos courtesy of Dell’s capacitor problems in 2005. Our poor GX270s literally started melting its capacitors on the motherboard so Dell had to replace all of them.
I wonder if any other non-profit orgs are taking the path less traveled (buying new workstations). I think there’s no compelling reason to purchase new workstations before Vista rolls out. Almost all the new apps I consider buying are web-enabled to some extent so these apps aren’t particularly CPU-intensive. What does the blogosphere say about buying new workstations? Nay or yea?
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Well, we’re all Apple/OS X at our nonprofit, but we have similar issues considering the release dates of the next os versions (10.5/Vista) will be close to each other.
That being said, I’ve been keeping a close eye on Vista. I think there’s no reason to buy new PC hardware until considerably after Vista ships, especially as you’ve got P 4′s. My big concern with Vista is that taking advantage of the new features and effiencies will be complex, and require lots of training.
Like you, all apps I buy going forward should allow web access. The holy grail here is total platform independence–mac, pc, cellphone, PDA, whatever–and total access to all business tools from anywhere. Maybe one day!
You know, I’m a little excited by the prospect of buying Apple Macs with Bootcamp years from now especially if Bootcamp allows for running Vista in a window. Could you imagine? Running say your Development department on Macs because of their design-heavy work but everyone else on PCs. I hate running heterogenous environments but Apple Mac + Windows Vista on one Intel Core Duo = IT yumminess.
For sure, that’s exciting. heck, I could use virtualization NOW: we use Quickbooks on a PC, as my research told me QB for OS X was a piece of junk. I’m glad we did, because it is (at least 2005 for mac).
We have another PC, for ArcView GIS. Those are the only two windows machines we use. I’d love to run virtualized windows on Macs for both of these, and toss the PC’s, but Virtual PC was really slow before.
There’s at least one virtualization solution that’s out as a downloadable Beta, available right now, from Parallels:
http://www.parallels.com/
I haven’t tested it yet, but I hear it works OK. Also, VMware announced they’ll have a product as well. And, we’ll see what apple has up it’s sleeve. Choice is good.
I agree that heterogenous environments are a pain on the desktop. But for server/network infrastructure, I think it works well; the right tool for the right job. It does for us. (I use multiple *NIX variants for this, no Windows though.)