Office Systems...

[Steve]

OK, so many of you people use them, but what do you think of them.

At work I have to put up with a Celeron that has a MASSIVE 64Mb of RAM. Running a terminal program, address program, IExplorer (for online maps etc,) Excel and Acrobat Reader takes it's toll on such a system. I really hope it gets upgraded soon - many of the other office systems have been.

Anyway, what do you deem to be acceptable in the way of systems for general office usage, or what gripes do you have with the systems you tend to use/see advertised?

[Platinum]

im stuck with a PIII with 128mb ram, its damn slow, the thing that kills it is that work insist we have to use the full version of Acrobat 6, therefor it loads everything when I load a PDF, takes about 3 mins to load a average sized PDF

[Moby-Dick]

Platinum , try holding down shift before you open the PDF , it cuts down the loading time a lot.

The standard Pc I'd spec for a "normal" office client would be a celeron 2.2 with 256 Meg ram ( 512 for heavier users ) Hd space is immaterial as no data should ever be stored on it.

Depending on the back end systems you use, you can get away with pretty low spec client PC's which is good if you have to buy lots of them.

the best upgrade you can give an office PC is dual monitors , it really boosts peoples productivity.

[Jiff Lemon]

better not mention the spec of our works machines eh moby?

[Moby-Dick]

but thats coz we are special

[Butuz]

Yeh, Special Needs

Anyway, Personally i always make sure i specify 512MB ram and a 7200RPM hard disk. After that, it doesnt really matter. In general office tasks theres not much difference between a Celeron 2.0 and a P4 2.8. OK the PC might load windows faster, but apart from that in normal office apps you aint gonna tell the difference. Can you notice word opening 0.1 second faster?

For my Windows XP admin station that i use to administer the Win2000 domain, i have a P4 2.8, 512MB PC3200, 40GB WD SE drive. Its nice and fast, and the faster my computer is the faster i can sort things out.

For my Win98 Admin Station that i use to administer the Win NT4 domain, i got a Lowly Celeron 1100, 256MB, 20GB 5400RPM HDD. A 7200RPM HDD would be a bonus, but to be honest Win98 flies on that spec anyway.

For my Appbuilding machine that i have just ordered to be used for creating application packages, MSI's etc for both networks, it will be a Celeron 2400, 512MB DDR, 40GB 7200rpm HDD. That should be fast enough for now (though i will be getting a faster one for this next year).

Butuz

[Bleek]

I'm fortuante to be able to sign orders hence I have an Athlon 3200xp, 2GB 400MHz, ATI9800 Pro, RAID 0+1 4x WD Raptor 10k and gigabit networking. Superb for lunchtime gaming. Justification if anyone ever asks? Well its needed for AD admin of course, its very cpu intensive *cough*

For general office use I build XP Pro, 2500xp, 512mb, ATI 9200 (or equiv), 100mbit on a solid mobo such as the Epox 8KRA2+ or Asus...etc

[Moby-Dick]

bleek , do you component build your office machines then ?

I found through bitter experience that the warrenties offered by the likes of HP are s godsend.

then again this is probably because I'm an outsourced supplier. If I were specifying kit for internal use I'd component build it ( if I had the time )

[Bleek]

Well we have used a number of companies in the past and quite frankly they wern't up to scratch, numerous problems.

I've built all our latest batch, I keep a spare mobo, ram, cpu, psu and hdd's around just in case but so far so good.

We also bench the previous 3 branded machines and my kit outperforms them all, easily.

I'm currently setting up a small mail-order custom PC business on the side, I'm an IT Consultant (networking, security and structure) by day with 7 years in the industry and also past experience running www.maxhdw.com (maximum hardware) do you remember us?

[MD]

One Dell Optiplex G270 2.8 P4
One HP Vectra VL420DT 1.8 P4
One HP Vectra VL400DT PIII733
One Latitude Cx somthing or other PII 550 lappy

The Dells my new office box, hence why it sounds odd when I say this is all connected to a HP 22" CRT with switch for two displays.

The old PIII is being retired, but thats cos it is tired, very bleedin tired.

m@

[Howard]

College PCs are all I can talk about... Lol

Most of them are new Celeron 2ghz machines... Stupidly slow and utterly crap tbh. Most computers at my college are crap. They just buy the cheapest.
The ones I use most often are 366Mhz Celerons with 64MB of RAM. Only marginally slower than the 2GHz Celly/256MB RAM machines.

[Howard]

but thats coz we are special

Who's who?

[gobbo]

Most of our machines at work are 2.2ghz Cel, 512mb RAM etc etc, but soon all being replaced with 2.6ghz P4 to cope with the extra greedy new version of Sage MMS, which requires us to replace our WHOLE IT suite, cause the directors don't listen when you tell them anything

[Jonny M]

What work do you do Kez? and Chris nice setup.

I don't get a PC at work unless the IBM VIA 500MHz POS systems running XP count.

[Rythmic]

I feel lucky all of a sudden


2.8/800 P4 on an Asus P4C800 - with 1GB Corsair LL PC3200, 9200SE driving 2 19" Mitsubishi 930SB CRTs (dual monitors are so useful for development), and a 120GB Diamond Max 9+ (big fast hard drives go in servers)

'Corse, I spec most of the teams PCs...

[Moby-Dick]

Who's who?

I'm the one with the booze

we have more gadgets since