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Our Social Security Dollars

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by itcurious

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Your/my Social Security Administration contacted recently several school systems in Georgia to invite them to a computer donation activity. The employee that picked the ones that our county accepted said that there were hundreds of them in a warehouse in Marietta, GA. We got enough (DELL's GX110, 733Mhz, Pentium III, 10GB hard drives, 256MB RAM, CDRom, floppy drive and a nice 15 inch monitor) to assemble a couple of labs. I just want to know why the Social Security decided to replace perfectly good 4 years old PC's, spending millions of our dollars unnecessarily? Did something like this happened in your state, too?

9 replies

by syscokid

Why? Because someone decided that we needed at least a 933 Mhz processor to support Windows XP and Active Directory.

Actually, the previous commissioner, Ken Apfel, promised that workstations would be upgraded every three years. Believe it or not, as recently as 2002 many offices were still using Pentium I's with 32 meg of RAM.

BTW, I didn't think the GX110's had 256 MB RAM.

by jdmercha

The cost of supporting computers that are over 4 years old excede the cost of buying a new one.

by jessie

And factor in the productivity increase when people aren't sitting around waiting for their computer to "think" about a cpu request, I'd rather my tax dollars went to helping goverment work more efficiently.

by jdclyde

If more people are buying more computers, then people have jobs. People that have jobs pay into the SS fund a lot more than people that don't have jobs.

Then if the old computers are being donated where they can do a lot of good for little or no cost this is really a good thing. Kids that otherwise would have either not had a computer lab or one still filled with Apple IIe's or some kind of crap. (Yes, last year I saw a private school that STILL had those old peices of crap wasting space in a class room)

by itcurious

Thanks for your quick positive responses but, my negative state of mind regarding this upgrade, is not still convinced that this upgrade was required yet. SyscoKid says this was because of a processor speed requirement but, http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/evaluation/sysreqs.mspx says that 300Mhz is the minimum requirement. JDMercha indicates that support cost is too high, well, it depends on who provides that service. We support over 3,000 PC?s and attachments (+3yrs old) with one (1) technician, salary and parts for a lot less than $100K. Jessie, unless you are playing those sophisticated new games, 733Mhz still runs whatever they use (Microsoft Office?) at the SS. I don?t think that waiting a couple of seconds can hurt the operation, besides, something they really don?t need is more free time. And JDClyde, have you seen inside these computers? Singapore, Republic of China, Mexico, Japan, Canada, some of the places names you always find everytime you remove the covers. Have you called for support? Again, Canada, Ireland, Australia, India are getting those jobs. I know that these computers at some point are going to require to be upgraded. I just don?t think that today, was the right time . Maybe a couple of years down the road, unless they are using software that really, really requires the upgrade. I use a 733MHz (running WinXP) I bought 5 years ago because my 66Mhz could not handle the radio station I used to listen. Probably internet video will make me upgrade soon but until then, all the software I use is still operational. I don?t know, maybe I?m worrying too much about my Social Security checks.

by jdclyde

Was just trying to look for any positives of the situation.

It isn't someone in India that will sell, install, and configure the new systems.

As for the systems keeping up. I am sitting on a celeron 600 (white box) and it does EVERYTHING I need a WORK computer to do. But then we don't run all the MS bloatware either. Does the SS depart? I would think they are still on Unix based servers with a telnet console? That and e-mail.

by hardee522

Got more bad news for you, my friend. We got a new server recently and the big company from Texas contracted a well known "Relativity" company that sent two technicians that come on temporary assignments from India to perform these jobs, installation and configuration. Tickets from Bangladesh and per-diem is still less than employing you or me to do it.

by jdmercha

Along the same lines of the cost effectiveness of replacing PC every 3-4 years:

It is generally accepted that you need one tech for every 150 PCs.

If you replace computers every 5 years, then with 3,000 PCs you are replacing 12 per week. So that one tech has time to configure 12 computers each week and respond to trouble calls?

by awfernald

The upgrade of the SSA system has been going on for quite some time (I helped in the upgrades here in Kansas and Nebraska) and I believe that the decision was made to bring the nationwide network into a narrow set of standard configurations.

The two situations I noted, in Kansas, most of the machines were a lot older than 3-4 years old, and in fact, they had to replace a good portion of 10base2 network to get the new machines up and running. Thus, new computers were a requirement for Kansas.

In Nebraska, the facility I helped with there was a brand new facility (less than 6 months old), and it did seem a waste to be replacing those computers with new computers. However, they also had a variety of equipment, which this new installation brought into a standard configuration.

So basically, the way I see it, you had thousands of computers spread across the entire country, ranging in age from 1-8 years old, and to bring them all into a single standard, they replaced them all with brand new computers.

Those states that had computers between 1-4 years old got fortunate in that the old computers could now be donated out and productively used by the local school systems, whereas those states that had older computers got a much needed upgrade and also had to figure out how to deal with hundreds of totally obsolete pieces of equipment.

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