IT BS thread

If you're a reasonably large company (20+ employees I'd wager?) just get the extended warranties and don't look back. If your architecture is built right go thin client and never worry about repairing again.

 

Also, is this your boss

 

You get two guesses on which evil we buy, Probooks or Apple? Yup, both of them.

Yeah, that's kind of the problem we're way beyond large right into damn big. Big enough that our tech was a certified repair guy for both Apple and HP and did a lot of the warrantee work in house. I'm not the type of guy that keeps doing things because that's how its always been done and by having repair moved into my department I want to revisit decisions I wasn't involved in. At my previous gig repair was in my department and outsourced, but that place was considerably smaller with about 4K computers. I guess I'm wondering if anybody does it in house anymore?

lol you caught the reference, and yes, I do have a red stapler on my desk.

 

The day we get someone high up who wants to go in the Apple direction for desktops or laptops is the day I start looking for somewhere else hiring.

Fortunately, I don't see that happening. I have even managed to sway us away from iPads as much as possible so they are only purchased for specific scenarios.

 

Work for a larger organization. My seperate business unit is jist under 4k and thats just us. Take that times about 3 and you get the idea. All of our HP warranty work is done through a HP authorized service provider. We have on site repair warranties as well. They've even set up shop in our main office as we give them enough work to do so. They also handle our multifunction printers for service anyway.

For any large organization, if your warranty is on site repair, then find a provider to do the work. That's their job and HP or Apple for that matter should be paying for the tech repair. Not the organization.

Just my 2cents anyway.

Good luck man..

Forgot to mention, you have to wonder if you previous tech was double dipping pay. Paycheck from you organization and one from HP?

 

Cool to see this thread exists! Hello everyone.

 

I would think you'd be pretty safe since Apple stuff is over-priced, and many companies want to be cheap about things.

 

Exactly why we end up with HP ProBooks even though ThinkPads are superior.

 

You try the Elitebooks? They're not half bad.

 

Nobody ever comes back with bids on them based on our specs. They're teacher PCs, so they don't need any crazy hardware--we generally go with a 128 GB SSD, CPU usually ends up being an AMD A8 or Intel i3, and 4 GB of RAM in a 14" machine. Guessing the price point would be too high anyway.

The difference between the Probooks we get and a ThinkPad E series (which, in comparison to any other ThinkPad is very inexpensive) is typically only about $25/unit.

We do, on the other hand, usually end up with EliteDesks. They have been very reliable--don't think I've ever had to warranty one.

 

In a reasonable service interval I'd contend most desk top equipment is in the ranks of "hardly- if ever- warrantied." I've got customers still running XP on their networks.

 

How often do you all (at home) reinstall Windows? Just curious.

It's been about a year and half since I installed Windows on my home PC.

 

I've had and abused my current Windows 10 upgrade install for a long time now. It started as Windows 7 on one computer until the motherboard died catastrophically... I actually managed to repair Windows by getting system drivers installed and bringing it up on a new motherboard. Then later Windows 10's free downloads started. I upgraded about a week after W10 came out for free.

I've always contended that a good techie can keep a machine running healthily. It's shitty users who screw up computers.

 

Yeah, the days of the Dell OptiPlexes with swelled capacitors seem to be over. We run SSDs in everything now, too (Roughly the oldest 10% is still using spinning disks) and I haven't had one fail yet.

We're about 60% Win 10, 40% Win 7 here. Should be able to get rid of or reimage the remaining Win 7 boxes before the year's up.

Never.

I bought my ThinkPad maybe 4 years ago. Originally had 7 Pro, got the update to 10 Pro and it's doing just fine.

But I don't do much with it. Probably only touch it every 2-3 days. I sit in front of a computer all day at work, so I have no desire to when I get home.

 

I often envy guys who have networks that are very healthy... I work for an MSP and we just have these idiot penny pinchers... ugh.

 

My housemate works for an MSP, I don't envy him at all. He asked me not long ago what we used for VPN hardware between our buildings and I realized just how different I have it--we have always had point-to-point connections. Before fiber it was T1s, before that it was frame relay. Couldn't imagine having to mess with separate internet connections and VPN connections. Not to mention, I like having my own network. I know it inside and out, spend a lot of time improving it because every improvement I make makes my life easier, etc. I've spent a lot of 1 AM nights here because I got excited about something and wanted to finish it.

I think we're in decent shape for being an environment with limited money. We have almost every server virtualized in a vSphere/vSAN environment on 4 ESXI hosts with 12-core Xeons and a 10 gb backbone (in an air conditioned, temperature alarmed rack with four APC 3000 UPSs and generator backup), every switch in every building is 1GB PoE, better than half of our APs are AC, and our other buildings' links back to the main datacenter range from 100 mbps - 10 gbps depending on size and whether or not we own the fiber. Desktops and laptops may not be screaming i7 machines, but we would never spec a Celeron and haven't bought a machine without an SSD in almost four years.

 

never. in win10, you can "refresh" your installation and it essentially does a new windows install and saves your data.

 

This isn't really as bad as it sounds. I came from VOIP where we pushed MPLS real hard but in MSP land with large amounts of bandwidth coming very cheap it's easy to pop up two WAN connections and VPN the sites. Bandwidth is, after all, one great solution to the biggest reason to deploy MPLS (QOS).

I've got customers with cheese ball tape backups. Public RDP with weak ass passwords. It's super exhausting. When these things fail them, as we warn them time after time it will, they just yell and shout at us about how we didn't prevent it.

 

Thanks for the replies guys.

FYI: I have Windows 7 (not Windows 10)

 

Our buildings tend to be rural and the state ran a ton of fiber a few years back to be used for public institutions, so we have the unique situation where nobody in those towns has access to cable or fiber, but because we are a public institution we can use the fiber the state ran (eventually, assuming funding is raised, they will go through the "last mile" effort to get that fiber to residences, but I think that's a ways away). At that point, it makes much more sense to go through the same ISP and have those connections be point-to-point back to the main. Because they were so rural, our only option before that was T1s.

Three of our buildings are on different roads, but share a large plot of land, so we have our own SM fiber buried between them and have it lit up at 10 gbps now.