Cost-ineffective “7″ Deployment at Robert Pogson

I keep finding stories on the web about how to roll out “7″ and save money. Let’s see

Chuck a perfectly working system = -$150 (the hardware is worth something and the licence is as good as it was on day 1)
Buying new hardware to get a slower performance = -$500 (looks like a bad choice to me…)
Paying for another licence just to have what you got from the old one = -$100 (or more if you buy licence for Office or get “Ultimate” etc.)
and still fighting malware and re-re-reboots = -$500 ( Who knows how much this costs? There’s no end in sight.)

That looks like -$1250 and you get nothing for the expenditure… How is that cost-effective? Any possible benefit is just a wash, about the same as the last system that you are chucking while still viable. One could go to Debian GNU/Linux and be free of most of these costs. Really. If you can get all your machines to boot PXE, you can slap GNU/Linux onto hard drives in 20 minutes or so and you are done. One re-boot and the system is working, free of malware and not slowing down until there is a hardware or network failure. If the machines are really old, you will be better off using LTSP, a package in many distros these days, to boot them and users run applications and sessions on a powerful new machine that can please dozens at once.

I don’t see how “cost-effective” can be used in the same sentence as that other OS.

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.

5 Responses to “Cost-ineffective “7″ Deployment”

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1 Richard Chapman Dec 9th, 2010 at 8:17 pm

Some economists are saying this recession will be more like a climate change. It could last a long long time. That’s not good if you’re selling “shiny”. Shiny just makes managers feel good. They’ll have to realign some core beliefs to stay relevant.
2 Robert Pogson Dec 10th, 2010 at 5:01 am

Retail can change. One of the growth areas in PCs is the “all-in-one” PC, no box at all, just a monitor, keyboard and mouse.

see http://www.pcworld.com/article/168576/allinone_pcs_with_a_touch_of_style.html

There is still resistance to using a low-power CPU but that will come. I see my terminal server idling with 20 students running on it but the consumer doesn’t. They still do not understand that a server can do a better job.
3 twitter Dec 11th, 2010 at 9:28 am

The assumption that Windows 7 will give you what that other OS has been giving you is generous at best. Microsoft completely changed the driver model for Vista and knew that this would break everything “across the board for printers, scanners, WAN, accessories and so on.” Windows 7 is based on the same set of drivers, so old hardware still hits the trash when people move to it. What’s more important for business users, however, is disruption due to loss of important programs. Doing so much as “upgrading” from IE6 breaks all sorts of applications that have no immediate replacement in the non free world. The idiots at Microsoft need massive sales to make up for the Vista failure, so they are recommending bulldozer style replacements.

A better strategy is to virtualize XP and leave a few working legacy computers until all of your workflow has migrated to the free world of gnu/linux. This is much less disruptive and really saves money both long and short term. Even a bulldozer style gnu/linux deployment would be more cost effective than a move to whatever Vista is called these days because it can be rolled out on existing equipment and licensing costs can be dropped.
4 Robert Pogson Dec 11th, 2010 at 9:48 am

I had an incident of this just yesterday…

In a nutshell, one of our teachers insisted on going back to that other OS. The system she was using had a “7″ restoration CD set so I spent hours of my life setting it up for her. Yesterday, she noticed that she could not print to an HP1020 sitting on her desk. She assured me the day before she had… I think she had a lapse of memory because “7″ has no driver. “7″ could not find any and HP had none on their site. I put back an old PC with Debian Squeeze GNU/Linux so she could print again locally… I expect eventually she will want GNU/Linux on the new machine. I am going in circles around a high-maintenance user. Some converts take more effort than others.

This school is full of HP printers. Quite a few will not work with “7″ except by some proxy. Hence, we have only three “7″ machines, two being in offices. HP should not produce printers that last so long if they cannot create drivers for them. I have one that is from the early 1990s and it still works although the print quality is poor. Even XP could not drive it.

I think a large number of existing XP machines will go to GNU/Linux just because of the silly cost of replacing a working machine with another working machine for no net benefit.
5 aikiwolfie Dec 12th, 2010 at 12:35 pm

One of my major bugbears with Windows is the way it slows down over time. No matter how many times I explain to people their hardware is perfectly fine and Windows is the problem, they just keep on trucking with Windows.

Mostly this is because they are locked-in to iTunes. Way to go Apple.