What's your work IT equipment like?

LizardKing said:
You'd think, but the gov agency's i work with have some of the latests kit and never have issue signing off new servers etc.

One agency i know of has its users rocking around with 2 14" Dell i7 laptops, they were absorbed into a larger agency but they needed to have access to there older systems. all in the name of cost savings.
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Like the companies offering huge pensions, where are these government bodies with large pots of cash?

I've worked for three large public sector places and neither of them had two pennies to rub together. In fact the last one took SIX MONTHS to order a £5k server due to the red tape involved in securing the funds.

Large companies like dell, hp, IBM, Microsoft who I've spoken with share my opinion that the public sector is strapped for cash.
 
Dell I3 desktop 4 or 8Gb ram (not sure)
boots up very quickly, and logs in to the domain network very quickly,

we run everything inside citrix here so speed of the base station is less important.

we were running on Pentium Ds until about 2 years ago though, they took a while to boot up.


however what is frustrating is a recent company move from self-hosted exchange to "cloud" hosted exchange, most of what we do is via email and it is frustratingly laggy now :(
 
Most of our desktops are I5''s and until recently only 2gb RAM, after a ton of staff started buying their own memory they eventually upgraded to 4gb RAM across the board, my laptop is an I5-6300U with 8GB ram.
 
TheOracle said:
Like the companies offering huge pensions, where are these government bodies with large pots of cash?

I've worked for three large public sector places and neither of them had two pennies to rub together. In fact the last one took SIX MONTHS to order a £5k server due to the red tape involved in securing the funds.

Large companies like dell, hp, IBM, Microsoft who I've spoken with share my opinion that the public sector is strapped for cash.
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Depends which part.

Since all the hacking nonsense the MOD has realised how far behind the UK is so theres a big push going on at the moment. It's not uncommon for an IT/comms team to have a million+ yearly budget. But this is bigger picture stuff, councils etc are nobody in the grand scheme of things and they get the scraps.
 
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Current laptop is a Lenovo X240 with a i5-4300U & 4GB of RAM (32bit windows). Everything is heavily locked down as per group IT policy (I work in Tax). I do have dual monitors hooked up to my dock though which is nice.
The machine itself is fine for light work but I could really do with more grunt on some of the datasets I work with.

Generally everyone in the business (circa 1500+ employees in Head office) has similar kit albeit a few have Macbooks (assume preference) and higher end workstations for design / dev etc.

Overall not bad but a little bit inconsistent depending on department.
 
TheOracle said:
Like the companies offering huge pensions, where are these government bodies with large pots of cash?

I've worked for three large public sector places and neither of them had two pennies to rub together. In fact the last one took SIX MONTHS to order a £5k server due to the red tape involved in securing the funds.

Large companies like dell, hp, IBM, Microsoft who I've spoken with share my opinion that the public sector is strapped for cash.
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I'm guessing that's local government/council type place?, we work with a few central gov agency's and they don't seem to have issue getting items signed off. or if they do they hide it well!
Though we are a consultancy firm and that seems to hold weight in a lot of places, i bet if the local IT team said the same it would be a lot of thumb twiddling, it shouldnt be that way but it seems to be the case.
 
I work in a workshop, I use my own Dell Studio 1749 (i5, 8GB Ram, 128GB SSD/500GB HDD), plus a Panasonic Toughbook CF-C1 (i5, 12GB RAM, 250GB SSD).

But the other laptops and computers are very mediocre i3/4GB systems. I think the Server has an Xeon E3 of some description. There's a very old CF-18 toughbook still in use with XP on it, last time I checked it had well in excess of 60k hours on it.
 
TheOracle said:
Like the companies offering huge pensions, where are these government bodies with large pots of cash?

I've worked for three large public sector places and neither of them had two pennies to rub together. In fact the last one took SIX MONTHS to order a £5k server due to the red tape involved in securing the funds.

Large companies like dell, hp, IBM, Microsoft who I've spoken with share my opinion that the public sector is strapped for cash.
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Its a very disparate landscape. My current place up until about 6-7yrs ago IT was a cost pressure and wasn't invested in, I had to save up a few years investment to upgrade the 14yr old network. We had a change of Chief Exec and Finance Director and they see IT as an enabler. I've had at least £5m a year since then for infrastructure and devices. It's getting tighter to get money though, at its peak I spent £12m, down to £5m this year and another drop looming next year, but that is the same across all departments where I work, not just IT. Securing funds is straight forward, I set out a 10yr outline plan that is approved by the board, from that I do a more detailed 5yr plan, down to the annual plan which is forecast monthly. To release up to £100k, so long as it is in plan, it's a 2 page document approved by me and the FD with ability to buy as soon as it gets set up on the system, for up to £2.5m it goes through an investment committee as a full business case (about 10-20 pages) which meets monthly, over £2.5m requires CE/FD/Chair to approve. I've never waited more then 4 weeks for approval even for big stuff like datacentres, wireless deployment etc.

Current works device is an i7/8Gb/256SSD Lenovo Yoga 12, moving to an i7/8Gb/256SSD Lenovo X1 Yoga when it gets built soon.
 
CPU: AMD Athlon Phenon II 6 Core 3.4ghz Black Edition
RAM: 8 Gb
HDD: 128 GB SSD
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 7770
OS: Windows 10

Used for sending emails , printing invoices and browsing these forums.
 
Just awful, I've basically frankensteined a half usable PC together.

Currently an:
i3 2120
6GB DDR3 (from the original 4)
150GB Raptor HDD (from the original 80GB POS)
Coolermaster Evo Heatsink (was hitting 99c with the stock one, as it was making almost zero contact with the CPU)
nVidia 610
1 x Dell 20" and 1 x LG 19"
 
MassiveJim said:
however what is frustrating is a recent company move from self-hosted exchange to "cloud" hosted exchange, most of what we do is via email and it is frustratingly laggy now :(
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If you're a big Office 365 customer and don't use ExpressRoute then I feel for you.
 
Currently got an XPS 13 9360 with I7-7500U 16Gb RAM and 512Gb NVMe SSD and dual 24" monitors.
Helps to work in IT :)
Rest of the office users have i5 or I7 desktops with 8Gb RAM and mainly 500Gb mechanical drives.
A few Xeon based workstations for CAD.
External sales have new XPS15.

Typically replaced at around 5 years old.
 
For me I run a clevo laptop with the following spec:

skylake 6700hq, 32gb ddr4, nvme 512 + 2x 1tb SSD's & GTX970 6gb, 4k ips screen then a couple of other screens plugged in.

Looks exactly like this:



Its getting on a tad now though so is due an upgrade soon I think.
 
ajf said:
Currently got an XPS 13 9360 with I7-7500U 16Gb RAM and 512Gb NVMe SSD and dual 24" monitors.
Helps to work in IT :)
Rest of the office users have i5 or I7 desktops with 8Gb RAM and mainly 500Gb mechanical drives.
A few Xeon based workstations for CAD.
External sales have new XPS15.

Typically replaced at around 5 years old.
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What's the 7500U like?

It's a good point about employee satisfaction, I've left jobs before partly due to rubbish computers. I don't have heavy power demands but often work in large spreadsheets.

As others mentioned SSDs would make a huge difference.
 
Currently running an ancient Dell (E6410, i5-M560, 4GB RAM, Windows 7 32 bit) and waiting on a Lenovo T450 i5-5200u, 8GB RAM, Win7 64 bit.
 
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