Re: [tlug] Who do you recommend for Business Desktop?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "jb" == Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com> writes:

    jb> This may be a bigger answer than you were really looking for
    jb> :-)
    jb> On Sun, Feb 29, 2004 at 05:14:25PM +0900, Thomas Savarimuthu wrote:

    >> I wonder who can be the best in the following list in terms of
    >> performance, cost and support. Dell, Compaq/HP,IBM, Fujitsu,
    >> NEC, Gateway, Sotec(?)...

If you're in Japan, Gateway has had its troubles.  Fujitsu and NEC
have long histories of monopoly-wannabe game-playing (gratuitous
incompatibility, like the stupid NEC mice which were bog-standard up
to the terminal, at which point you found a jack that a standard mouse
wouldn't fit into).  Toshiba did better, but occasionally succumbed to
temptation.  I know that NEC has whole labs that can't produce a 1mm
blip on an EEG; dunno whether that affects their commercial offerings.
(To be fair, I know some really smart people who are very productive
at NEC, too.)

Current favorite around here seems to be Dell.  Never bought one
myself, but I would guess that popularity means that they don't leave
people high-and-dry.

    jb> You might also get better support [from a local vendor],
    jb> although nothing is ever guaranteed anywhere.  However, a
    jb> person who buys 20 or 30 workstations from a local business is
    jb> a much bigger fish than a person who busy 20 or 30
    jb> workstations from one of the big suppliers.

This really depends on your interpersonal skills and effort.  If you
have a track record of "good picks" for suppliers, I would definitely
go with the local guy if and only if he impresses you.  My experience
with random local vendors, especially but not limited to Japan, has
been that you're much more likely find people whose efforts leave them
with over-developed lips and brown noses rather than ones with system
building and support skills.  The majors generally are reasonably
professional.  It's like McDonald's: you can do a lot better with a
good local eatery, but when you're in strange territory, you won't
make that big a mistake buying IBM (or Dell or SONY or ...).

    jb> For areas of the main server which cannot be made redundant
    jb> (such as the motherboard), keep a spare on-site.  Consider
    jb> using hot-swappable disks (this means SCSI).

A possible additional/alternative strategy is to use a distributed
file system such as AFS (Arla) or Coda.  These are possibly
high-maintenance, but if you have a workflow that fits their specs,
they can also be a really good deal.  Coda in particular provides
failover automatically as part of the design.  (Coda doesn't play that
well with diskless; it's designed for disconnected operation, and thus
likes to have a well-populated local cache.)

    jb> Put lots of memory in such a machine.  Putting in as much as
    jb> the motherboard will take would not be a bad idea.  Keeping
    jb> spare memory on hand is also not a bad idea.  Use premium
    jb> memory such as Micron or Crucial.  No bargain-basement stuff.

Did Jonathan remember to say put in all the high-quality memory the
machine will take?  ;-)  Except for really serious number-crunching
activity, it's almost always better to have more memory as opposed to
a faster CPU.  (Even for developers, it's not obvious; yes, if you're
compiling thousands of small files, a fast CPU is a win, but Heaven
help you if GCC ever dips into swap---I've seen that happen on a 1GB
machine.)


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