How over-specced are your work's computers?

The thing is, with "over-speccing" of office machines, its all you can do to try and remain efficient. As most people now are looking to try and increase the life of units from the standard 3 years until replacement, overspeccing is one such method of paying out to save money in the long run. The majority of you complaining will be at the end of the cycle, and the ones overspecced just at the start.

However, clever people use something like thin clients that allow you massively longer replacement cycles for end users with minimum purchase and maintenance costs. Therefore increading capacity/future proofing is done server side, and is much easier to manage and streamline.

Thin client technology is making a massive come back, more and more larger corporate/government/public sector clients are turning their backs on traditional PC environments in favour of virtualisation, and consolidation. It used to be easily dis-missed as the technology was not good enough to keep all users happy, but this has all changed over the last year or so.

What was once a niche market is now very much becoming the standard.
 
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I use both machines in my sig, but it's a bit of a cheat to be honest because I bought them both. The laptop goes to and from work with me everyday, and the desktop stays there except for weekends.

In my defence I do use Visual Studio, Photoshop, Illustrator, Firefox & IE7 & Virtual PC running IE6, Outlook and usually 2 or 3 Programmer's Notepad sheets open all at the same time, so I need somethign with a bit of grunt!
 
Ours are underspec'd!

I work as "junior" in the IT Department at the school I have just left, and we have 3 Domain Controllers all of equal spec, which are about 5 years old, and then there is the master domain controller which also does Print Server, and then mail server in a virtual machine, which is a poor spec, for a brand new server, 2.00 C2D, 3GB RAM (why they didn't get 4 is beyond me).

Now...our machines ah-hem...

64MB RAM, no HDD Space and a 200Mhz processor with flash memory...alright, alright they are terminals :D :rolleyes:
 
Craig321 said:
Over-specced? Phttt

Dell OptiPlex GX270
Intel Pentium 4, 2400 MHz
Intel(R) 82865G Graphics Controller (96 MB)
Maxtor 6E040L0 (40 GB, 7200 RPM, Ultra-ATA/133)
System Memory 512 MB
Intel Springdale-G i865G(V)

Makes me cry :(
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This is what I use as a file server, only with 2.2GHz Celeron, 1GB ram, and using the SATA port....really works well with SqueezeCenter..
 
Overspecced, LOL.

In my old job (which I left about 2 years ago) there quite a few callhandlers using Pentium(1)s running win95, a p2-266/64meg/NT4 machine doing loads of mailmerging and printing, and a P133/64meg rig sending out automated email reports to customers. In general no corporate upgrade policy. So despite all that, you had new starters sat writing word documents, emails and spreadsheets on flashy P4 rigs with WinXP.

OK so this was 2 years ago, but even so it seemed a bit strange to be running 20th century kit for reasonably demanding tasks.
 
Processor:* Single Xeon 5160 (3.0GHz/1333MHz/4MB) Processor
Hard Drive:* 160GB (10,000rpm) NCQ SATA Hard Drive
Hard Drive:* 160GB (10,000rpm) NCQ SATA Hard Drive
Memory:* 4GB DDR2 667 Quad Channel FBD Memory (8x512MB)

Graphics Card:* 750W-256MB PCI-E x16 nVidia Quadro FX3500
RAID 0:* SATA RAID 0 for 2 Hard Drives 405-10592

Dual 22" Wide screens.

Used for CAD / Rendering work mainly. :p
 
PCs at my last workplace were Celerons between 2 and 2.66Ghz, with 128\256MB or rarely 512MB DDR. Some of them had hard drives as small as 10GB. All with onboard graphics *sigh*

Right now I get to use a Pentium 4 with 1GB DDR and Geforce 4 MX graphics.
 
Computers at my work are over 10 years old and need to be replaced. They are running on win 95 if i remember right, and have 15" screens crashing a lot aswell at the minute :/

Dont have a clue on the spec, suppose it would be whatever was mid range computing in 1997 :p
 
Vigoro said:
Computers at my work are over 10 years old and need to be replaced. They are running on win 95 if i remember right, and have 15" screens crashing a lot aswell at the minute :/

Dont have a clue on the spec, suppose it would be whatever was mid range computing in 1997 :p
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Pentium Is with about 16-32MB RAM probably. Massive 3GB hard drives too :o
 
yeah, tesco are cheapskates though ^^ got some pc's out the back which aint been replaced since the store was opened in 1992 :/
 
We have at least one or two checkouts down at a time out of the 20 we have and it makes a big difference especially at weekends.
 
Vigoro said:
We have at least one or two checkouts down at a time out of the 20 we have and it makes a big difference especially at weekends.
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I used to work for Toys R Us looking after the tills and AS400 systems. 2 out of 20 is acceptable. I would imagine tesco have a newer till system on the radar for when the old system becomes EOL, and is no longer viable. Then the new system will be rolled out as and when required. However, every year you dont replace it is a saving :D

Toys were (and still are, iirc) using an IBM 4694/AS400 based system. This was first released in the very early 90's. It still works, is reliable (within reason) and would cost a massive amount to replace. Until it is required, they wont replace it. Even if they do I expect they will maintain the AS400 backbone, and look to some form of terminal emulation product to run with it.
 
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