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Ugrading workstations..a littlehelp?

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8 replies

by rawfish

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I have a client that is using P 133MHZ AND P166 MHz workstations.They have very small HD (1 GB -1.5 GB) 16MB -32-MB RAM.The monitors are going as well.

They are running Office 97/2000, ACCESS, FrontPage, Internet Publisher and Multimedia applications.

They are on average @ 20 mb disk space remaining. I have the task of getting them upgraded but this has to be done on a small budget. 5,0000.00 Now I have decided that perhaps buying off lease product may fit the bill.
PII 300333 or 350, 64MB, 4GB HD, NIC, CD, SOUND, . This is what we need. Anything more would be a strain cash wise and I do not belive it to be neccesary as the specs mentioned will do the trick just fine.
Am I in the ball park with this ?
Any ideas an or suggestions are certainly appreciated.
Roy

8 replies

by lordinfidel

For 5K you can build at least 10 decent machines.

That is if you are willing to build them yourself and do some shopping for the parts.

Prices are really cheap right now..
(128 megs ram pc 133 sdram goes for about $20 - www.memman.com)

If market pro comes to your area (www.marketpro.com) I would go there and buy some barebones.

You can reuse your cdroms.

Chips are chip, go to www.pricewatch.com

Again to save cash, build the machines yourself.

by awjackson

Others may reccomend building, but to be honest you can most likely just buy those systemsfor under $3,000. And than just turn the existing machines into dumb clients to just run what ever shared application that needs to be ran. Save yourself time, just buy 3 pc's and convert the currents into print servers, modem server, and/or a secured file server. And make the other a counter sales type machine, no additional software would be needed, and with drives virgin you'll still get an acceptablespeed out of em.

by rdschaefer

You don't have to buy/build complete new systems, for around $400 you can upgrade the existing boxes with new M/Bs, CPUs (600MHz), H/D (30GB), and memory(256MB). I know because I did just that for one of my non-commercial clients.

Ralph

by james r linn

that the existing computers use a standard AT or ATX form factor, but many makers including Compaq, IBM , HP etc., make some computers which are not.

You also assume that the power supply, which is one of the more prone parts to fail given the fact it heats up the most and has moving parts, is still good and going to last.

Frankly when Dell offers a 900 Mhz Celeron with monitor for 699 $CDN(i'm sure other manufacturers have deals too), I wouldn't hesitate to tell someone to buy instead ofupgrade. For the hour I would spend in putting the parts together, I could find more valuable things to do.

The other option is to look for discontinued models from major manufacturers. If the need is as they stated no more than a PII 400, then adiscontinued model sitting in a warehouse can be a great buy. I buy Compaq Deskpros as our company standard and I know if I work a little to find a discontinued model in stock somewhere I can save about a third of the price. In major cities there are vendors who specialise in selling this stuff.

James

by pills

Upgrads seems to be the cheeper solution, I'd buy new HDD for half the pc's and slave the others so that you've got 2-3Gb in them, you should also be able to do the same with the memory if you have enough slots in the pc. The less time you can spendformatting and reinstalling software the more time you can spend shopping around for cheap upgrades,

by admin

you can get damn spanky nice new workstations with all the bells and whistles and still come under the generous $5000.00?

We only get to spend about 300-400$ on a new WS -can't imagine 5000.00$! I wish I had that kind of budget!

by jackzero

You can go buy a great $600 PC from www.ibuypower.com. Go check their site out. AMD's Pentiums and whatever you need to customize it to. The old PC's will give you problems, especially the power supply.

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