Why don't business laptops have SSDs as standard?
- Thread starter Sunbed
- Start date
The point was (which I elaborated on in a later post) that the IT equipment is never anywhere near approaching the largest expense involved in employing someone, if you replace kit every 3 years. If someone doesn't need a laptop, don't give them a laptop. But don't hand out some heavy plastic £400 heap of garbage and wonder why people don't get much done. £1300 over 3 years is £36 per month, which is around the cost of a phone contract. It's not a huge expense.
ITs job is to bring value to the business, not to spend as little as possible.
Last edited:
But you wouldn't provide an employee with a company phone if they didn't require one, would you?
Besides, £25/month (the difference between a £1300 and £400 laptop) x 50 is £1,250/month, or enough for an extra employee @ £15k (which is around what you'd pay a bottom of the ladder admin/data entry person).
Would 50 people with i7/16GB/SSD/dedicated GPU be able to do more data entry than 51 people with i3/6GB/mechanical drive/integrated graphics?
(Hint: I doubt the hardware is the bottleneck)
Permabanned
- Joined
- 28 Dec 2009
- Posts
- 13,052
- Location
- london
We use hp 8200 sff which comes with i3, intergrated graphics and display port. We upgraded the ram to 4gb and stuck in mx100 ssd. Cost around £400 each. Works well with 24 inch 1080p monitor over display port. Its a law firm so no heavy resource usage. It runs great.
Going to upgrade the switch stacks to gigabit soon as well.
Going to upgrade the switch stacks to gigabit soon as well.
Sorry, but you are really exaggerating the necessity of a £1300 laptop. You can get a good Lenovo for £800 and often much less depending on quantity ordered and the configuration you choose.
All you need for the average business machine is an i5 CPU and integrated graphics.
Sort of irrelevant because there is no guarantee that an extra member of staff will offset any performance defecit caused by using slower PCs. Also a budget of £15,000 doesn't let you employ someone on a £15k salary.
I get the idea that you match hardware to the task, I'm not advocating workstations for everyone. But saving £100 to get a spinning disk is at best short-sighted. The £1300 figure that people are getting hung up on is including stuff like 3 years of Dell ProSupport as well, it's not all pure hardware cost.
I would argue that for your average productivity worker who spends their day in Office and maybe a couple of LOB applications, an i5 is way OTT.
Earlier in the thread I mentioned some HP refurb desktops. 3Ghz C2D CPU, 4GB RAM and 120GB SSD works out around £140+VAT per unit (including a W7P license and a 2 year warranty). Unless the user is doing heavy number crunching (so probably not your average worker), I'd put my 50p on the refurb being generally quicker due to it's SSD.
It's not "way OTT", an i5 can be had for cheap nowadays, it is basically the minimum standard for business laptops and all of our company laptops (thousands of people) use it as a baseline.
If you spend your entire day every day in the office then all you need is a cheap desktop... but for anyone needing mobility and flexibility to work from home then a laptop is standard.
I agree, but spending an extra £50 to put an SSD in a £400 laptop is a far cry from the suggestion that EVERYONE needs a £1,300 laptop, which is quite frankly a laughable proposition.
Of course if you spent £850 less per laptop you could afford to have a couple of spares ready for deployment, meaning you wouldn't need the pro-support
Of course if you spent £850 less per laptop you could afford to have a couple of spares ready for deployment, meaning you wouldn't need the pro-support
Well...whilst I see where you're coming from, I disagree. Unless you have a very large team with members specifically managing the building and maintaining of the spares (trying to balance this on a busy service desk is a nightmare sometimes) then realistically that isn't feasible.
We would keep 10 spare laptops in stock, ready to swap out to people if needed then had Dell come in on a next day repair service for any hardware failures. They then got their laptop back usually within 24hrs. The support is still essential.
It's also a valid reason to refresh the machines, to keep them in warranty.
Really? You can buy a perfectly usable for a couple of hundred if you just want to browse the net and do office work
Clearly your opinion of a 'decent' machine is completely different from many others.
Also, there is a big difference between 'decent' and 'surplus to requirement'
Depends on the size of your user base surely? If you only have 20-30 users then it's perfectly feasible to "self support" any hardware failures.
Obviously if you have 2-300 then I agree, it becomes a bit more difficult
Depends on the size of your user base surely? If you only have 20-30 users then it's perfectly feasible to "self support" any hardware failures.
Obviously if you have 2-300 then I agree, it becomes a bit more difficult
Valid point, I forgot to mention it was close to 2000 users
Depends what i5 you're talking about? They range from 15w ultra low voltage dual cores to 90w quad cores beasts. I'd argue an i5-5300u isn't overkill for general purpose use, and i5-4670 probably is overkill.
Really? You can buy a perfectly usable for a couple of hundred if you just want to browse the net and do office work
Clearly your opinion of a 'decent' machine is completely different from many others.
Also, there is a big difference between 'decent' and 'surplus to requirement'
I think what Caged is referring to is an "enterprise class" machine. It doesn't matter what price you get it for, but getting something designed for enterprise is the way forward. The Dell Latitude series with SSD can be had for around the £450-550 mark depending on spec.
Last edited:
Associate
- Joined
- 16 Nov 2011
- Posts
- 696
the same reason a lot of businesses seem to run XP still
All of our 7 series dells have SSD's our PC's have i7, 8GB of Ram and SSHD.
Using/fixing some of our old equipment is torture due to the disk drive going mental...
Lets be honest. Most of us have pretty decent computers with SSD Storage at home. Its going to be obvious that we prefer them lol.
Never would I use a mechanical hard drive driven machine unless I absolutely have to. But I work in IT. So hey. I don't have to
Using/fixing some of our old equipment is torture due to the disk drive going mental...
Lets be honest. Most of us have pretty decent computers with SSD Storage at home. Its going to be obvious that we prefer them lol.
Never would I use a mechanical hard drive driven machine unless I absolutely have to. But I work in IT. So hey. I don't have to
£1300?!
Our i5/SSD Dell E7250 ultraportable machines cost just over £600. This is what we buy 'regular' staff. The i7 variant with twice as much RAM and SSD capacity is just over £800. This is what we give to our software and web developers. Nobody complains.
I do agree that it's inexcusable for an IT dept to be speccing business machines with mechanical hard drives in this day and age, though. We've standardised on SSDs for a few years now and we've had loads of positive comments from staff members who we have upgraded.