Life-cycle Costs at Robert Pogson

I read this on a website today:

Low life cycle costs
Only about 20% of the cost of owning a PC is in the purchase price.

That is a surprising claim for a company that sells both Linux and that other OS on its products. They do not advertise Linux, however. You have to ask for it on the phone, as if it were illicit.

Think what the numbers mean. If you buy a PC from them for $800 with that other OS, they predict you will spend four times that or $3200 supporting the PC over its lifetime. What they really should be saying is that you will be wasting money supporting that other OS over the lifetime. With Linux, the cost of maintaining the OS is much less. How much does it cost to type apt-get update;apt-get upgrade as root occasionally? What if you put it in a script executed periodically? With Linux, you may never have to re-install and you can go years without rebooting. Some folks re-install more often than once a year because that other OS is so poor at maintaining the file system.

Another thing they do not tell you is that the PC would cost much less with Linux and cost less to maintain.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.

3 Responses to “Life-cycle Costs”

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1 The other Pogson Jul 18th, 2007 at 8:57 am

“Only about 20% of the cost of owning a PC is in the purchase price.”

I can belive that My “desktop” cost me around $600 and now a new cpu, mobo and 8 hard drives later, plus lost data its about $2500.
2 Robert Pogson Jul 18th, 2007 at 9:27 am

That does not sound like maintenance but replacement…

“cost of owning a PC” does include disaster coverage, but that should be rare on average. E.g. a hard drive comes with 5 year warranty from Seagate and should last the life of a PC. Many use something like 1% per year failure rate. The CPUs and mobos should be much less. I do not see how hardware maintenance can be even a tiny part of the amount spent on malware/upgrades/installs with that other OS.

An example. Two years ago I was a Linux insurgent in a Wintel shop. The employer supported about 60 machines in the building and about one quarter of the machines were down at any time. I used the same machines as Linux terminals and had 100% uptime. Several times I helped out teachers whose machines would not boot that other OS by running over with a boot CD for PXE from my terminal server and had them working in seconds. I will not even mention the printing problems they had with that other OS… My students had 0 problems all semester. The rest of the school functioned in the Dark Ages.
3 Robert Pogson Jul 20th, 2007 at 9:47 am

I have dug up some numbers. Can we agree that apt-get update;apt-get upgrade will take care of routine matters? That leaves hardware disasters and security. Backup being the largest part of disaster recovery does cost something, perhaps $100/seat per year if it takes a whole hard drive. Here are numbers on security: $100 per seat per year in round numbers. So the $3200 number is FUD spread to make that other OS look like a bargain…