IT BS thread

Thats disappointing they moved the fingerprint scanner. The back reader was one of the features I liked the most about it. It was just so intuitive and easy to use.

 

So a distant family member passed away and my sister in-law asked if I would look at their old computers and get them ready for donation. I should have said no, but I'm a nice guy and what the heck. . . . And now I have just spent way too much fucking time looking at a bunch of old laptops. They look like usable computers - In the same way an empty can of beans looks like dinner. Squint your eyes and hold them at the right angle and maybe, maybe. No, just no! Junk is junk!

If I had to guess at the number of computers I've disposed of in my professional life, easily over 250,000, probably way more. I have a hard fast rule that end of life computers get recycled, period. If the best thing my staff has to do is fix old computers, then I am a crapy ass manager. But, then the sister in-law shows up with clapped out laptops and I go all stupid in the head. Finally got smart and pulled the hard drives for separate physical destruction. The rest of the empty husks are going to the recycle place at the dump.

 

People don't get why I won't let them keep old devices when we replace them with new ones. I think it's pretty obvious why we don't want to double the fleet of devices in service and can't be wasting time supporting old hardware.

 

Lease everything.

 

Last time we ran the numbers on that, it was more expensive than just buying enough outright to replace everything at the same rates.

 

With on prem support and all the other goodies? If so, that is surprising to me.

 

Same here. But we did cut a deal to buy on loan. Pay off devices in 3yr. The devices are mostly in the upper performance range and not just cheapys. With all the security crap that have to go on, can't afford not to have decent devices.

 

We don't do on prem support. Our failure rates are so low that it isn't really inconvenient to send a device out here and there.

 

I think one of the biggest reasons it's cheaper than leasing for us was that we pay for everything outright, so we don't have finance or interest to worry about.

 

I gotcha. Reading back up a bit, I think we're looking at two different situations. If we have whatever hardware failure, someone pretty much has to be on site same day to fix or repair. Since we have datacenters spread around the country, 24x7 on prem warranty support is required. No way we could justify flying an admin or engineer out with a hard drive or RAM in hand to swap it out.

 

Yeah, I've heard that a time or two. It's a backup, it can be used for other things, donate it to schools, donate it to the homeless, etc, etc. All I hear is spend endless staff time, that I already don't have enough of fixing, patching, updating, trouble shooting failures on hardware that is being replaced FOR A REASON!

 

Yeah, everyone is local for us so no big deal for one of my techs to run out and provide a loaner laptop to someone while theirs is undergoing a warranty repair.

 

I'm not involved in the logistics of our purchasing agreements. I just know what we do. With the large deals we make with the vendors, not sure where interest would even be a factor other than it's a good write off. I mean we're talking hundred of devices per month. Once we get through everybody, the cycle may start all over again as the devices we started with are getting dated and out of warranty. We're not into fixing hardware no longer under warranty.
it boils down to the size of the company and how you address the hardware cycles. Lease may be the right fit for you, whereas it's not the right fit for others.

 

Yeah, we're talking about 500 devices per year, so much less.

 

Are we talking anything good? I accept donations

(I could use some Thinkpad chargers)

 

Yeah, definitely different. We do that amount if not more in a months time frame.

 

https://youtu.be/BS6minI8_PY

 

256 colors on the screen at the same time!

Back then I was an OS/2 industry expert, got paid to speak at industry conferences touting the value of OS/2. Had a fully decked out PS2 model 70 with 120MB hard drive, 16MB RAM, 20MHz 386 with a 387 math coprocessor, connected by some nice token ring. All that for the low, low price of $10,000 ($20,000 today). Vastly superior to Windows, but even then I had my doubts. When Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 beta came out I told the bosses Microsoft was going to take over the world, but they said "we're an IBM shop." So I bailed at the first chance to work on AIX systems. Never stay with a sinking technology.

 

We had a guy who was “Novell ‘till I die.” Swore up and down that we were wrong for dropping those servers. When we shut our last Novell server off, we jokingly put him on suicide watch.

He was an MCSE 6 months later.

 

We used IBM LAN Manager, and I wanted to move the company to Novell in the worst way. Early in my career I learned a couple of hard lessons about employability and niche software. After OS/2 I swore I'd never get stuck supporting backwater software again.