[sclug] Council to pay 17m for computer upgrade

[Jason Rivers]

On Sat, 20 Mar 2010 18:41:29 -0000, "Mike Mallett" <mm-lists at ntlworld.com>
wrote:
> This seems to have started some debate in Reading ....
> 
>
http://www.getreading.co.uk/news/s/2067467_council_to_pay_17m_for_computer_upgrade


If the hardware is 3 years old, why was it running W2000, anyway? 3 year
old hardware is perfectly acceptable as a workstation, we still have some 5
year old systems at the office. They're mostly the ones that are running
Linux, Linux is very good on old hardware, as most of us probably already
know.

The other problem for many of these council/government systems is that
when they put the systems in, they _NEVER_ set them up with the latest
available version of windows. again, an argument for OpenSource. the
initial cost I'm sure would be more to move to OpenSource software, but
Canonical, Redhat & Novell all have schemes to make the process of
Companies moving from Windows to Linux, and creating an Open Source system
for them to operate on almost painless.

~?1000 per machine is too much, we're buying in workstations with quad
cores, bucket-loads of memory, etc for around ?600 for those in the office
that require there's a slightly higher price (due to 2 screens) and we have
MSDN Licensing, so we're not buying Billware(tm) for every machine we buy
in. 50% of the office machines are also on Linux. I can't see RBC needing
to have 2 screens on their systems. and Dell will sell a Precision
Workstation for under ?600 with a Billware(tm) License. Obviously their
licensing is going to come in the form of VLK, but that's still going to be
a significant cost.

Jason.