Software

Well I'd say the concensus is going to be 50-50 here.

Many IT staff like to use their knowledge to build their own, therefore you will hear how wonderful and cheap building a white box (non OEM) is.

Others will say go with OEM's only.

Here's MY take anyway.

Because I live in canada and have a reputable dealer, I ALWAYS choose OEM's for my clients, mainly Compaq desktops, and IBM notebooks.

Here's why:
1) The system is tested and configured by the manufacturer so that all compnents work well together and hardware conflicts are a thing of the past.

2) I get a 3 or 5 year ONISTE warranty with ALL computers, this way a simple phone call gets a tech at the door the nest day with replacement parts. Personally, I had over a grand in replaced parts with my OWN hardware this year, at no cist, with a smile and at MY home, without taking in PC's or shipping away parts for god knows how long. The one time I had a completely dead PC, they swapped the MOBO and deemed it was a dead box, they gave me a loaner the same day and sent me a brand new one within three days. Try that with an white box, you get the it isn't OUR hardware call X, then X says it isn't OUR hardware call X. Nobody accepts the responsibility and passes it off as another manufacturers problem.

3)All drivers are found on the SAME webpage of the SAME webite. I don't go to ASUS to hunt for the BIOS drivers, Nvidea for the chipset driovers etc. I just log in to the site, it auto detects my OS and system build, installed drivers and givs me a list of what's new.

4) Price is very competitive whereas at one time it was FAR cheaper to build your own, now it's still cheaper but the 5 year onsite service more than makes up for the additional cost.

Footnote: I am NOT referring to going to a retail electronics store and picking up a HP pavillion or Compaq Presario. If you use a dealer in business workstations, you will get a while new list of high end products to choose from. My desktop cost more than a desktop with a faster processor at the retail outlet. It also has a faster Hard Drive, better graphics card etc. oh yeah, and a 5 year onsite warranty. Most people will opffer 1 or 3 years but that is usually a carry in warranty, the phone support is weak at best whereas in a business desktop or 'professional ' workstation you will get much better tier one phone suport, or else they are sending a tech out.

I have lots of reasons for choosing OEM's, mainly, I can work on things other than dumb hardware issues and the warranty is much better. It's not MY problem, it's THEIR's.

Then again, I don't want to poke, prod tweak and test my computers all day, just plug em in and go on to my next task, let the manufacturer deal with their own problems, I didn't build the thing.

If you are a full time IT staff member, you want the most solid and reliable little PC's within your given price range to make the rest of your life there much easier. They should all be IDENTICAL for imaging, no Dell Dimension or Inspirons, just Optiplex and Latitude. Corporate class, uniform, easy and quick to re-image any time a user screws it up.

You also want them in a small form factor to make them easier to carry and move around. Forget about Pentium vs. Celeron vs. Athlon... Most general office users will be fine with the second or third choice from the top of any vendor product line. Go with the smallest HD, now about 40GB. Users should be storing all their data on the file server anyway.