How many technicians does it take.

That would depend on a few things. I see you are working for a school system. If we can assume that you have large amounts of identical equipment, and that you are supporting a large percentage of purely classroom computers, it should be possible toput together some standard images for your equipment. That way, the standard response to a computer problem would be to ignore most software errors and just wipe the drive and replace with a fresh image. That sort of response makes it possible to set up a facility where a teacher could initiate the re-ghosting of an image if they were having a problem before even bothering with tech support. This would greatly reduce the number of trained technical people you would need. If you could centalize your repair work by maintaining enough spares to perform quick swap-outs, you can limit the amount of experienced techs you would need. I think you could get away with 2-3 network admins, 2-3 really good PC technicians, and 5 or 6 entry-level techs capable of setting up computers, swapping components, and doing triage work.

Answer 1 works well when your PC's are configured alike. If your environment is an academic institution however I would find it hard to believe and of the PCs are formatted similarly and/or the data everyone needs resides in a single easily maintained database.

Your answer from question 1 works well for pure equipment problems however you might add a (temporary consultant?) data analyst to properly map your database(s) if many of your reported problems involve data access over the network (not an application problem but a data modeling problem few engineers understand).

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