Trying to put together information for grant proposal

I have been asked to put together what it would cost to replace the computers in our lab. We are a small Episcopal school and we currently have 22 9-10 year old XP machines in they lab. They have small hard drives (9.5 GB in most cases) and minimal memory 256-512MB and huge clunky monitors. We have various and assorted old inkjet printers in the lab - a few are all in one units with scanners.

I know I want something bigger with more memory and more hard drive. I can't even install everything I want on the machines the way they are now and there are many things we can't run because of memory issues.

I do want to stay with PCs because we many not be able to replace everything at once. I'm not sure if I want to go with Vista or buy something with the XP downgrade.

If you were putting this together what is the minimum configuration you'd want as far as memory, hard drive, monitor size, etc? Which brand would you recommend? Any you would avoid? Any processors you would avoid? Would you go with Vista or stay with XP?

Thanks for any suggestions you can offer.

Tags: hardware

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Permalink Reply by Paul Anderson on September 13, 2008 at 1:46pm

HI Vicky,

Here are some of my thoughts.

HP, IBM and Dell are probably all ok. When buying computers for school, it is most important to make sure you are buying the Business Class machines and not the Consumer models. The Business machines will cost you more, but usually will come with a 3 year warranty, and are more "tested" machines. You will most likely want to buy the machines with Vista and maybe XP downgrade (that may be the only way to XP in some cases). All of the new machines should come with at least 80GB hard drives, but I would push toward 160GB, as Vista requirements will demand more. As far as processors, getting a AMD machine might save you some money or get you a little more power for your money. 2GB of memory is probably a good point of memory. 19 inch monitors are pretty affordable right now, and are getting cheaper all the time. If you have to do this in phases, you may want to use some or all of your old monitors and get more computers in the first phase.

One thing you may want to look into is a program like DriveShield to make management of the lab easier. DriveShield (there are other lockdown programs as well) is a program that prevents permanent changes to the hard drive when enabled. No matter what students do on the computer, when you restart the computer, everything will be forgotten. When you want to make changes, you disable the protection, make the changes and enable the protection.

I am assuming you have some type of network in the lab, if not maybe you could put something in for that as well. A 24-48 port Switch is pretty affordable, and network cables are cheap. With a network, you could purchase a network printer and save lots of money on inkjet cartridges and supplies. It will also be much more reliable, increase the uptime of your printers.

I hope this helps a little, please let me know if you have any questions.

Paul

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Permalink Reply by Vicky S on September 13, 2008 at 7:04pm

Thanks Paul. I have been looking at both HP & Dell and have been looking at the Business Class machines with 2GB of memory and 160GB hard drives so it's good to know I'm on the right track.

We have a network in the lab. I didn't set it up and only know how to fix very minimal problems with it. It's pretty bare bones with a single router and some patch panels that are wired to the workstations. The printers we have are shared on the network but they're older inkjet models and the replacement cartridges are pricey. We did get one color laserjet and one b&w laserjet that I think I can add specifically as network printers.

I'm not sure I understand the advantage in making a printer a network printer vs. a shared printer on the network. What are those?

Since we don't have a network server I don't really want anything like DriveShield - the students save their work to their hard drive.

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Permalink Reply by Paul Anderson on September 13, 2008 at 8:40pm

A networked printer, is directly attached to the network, while a shared printer is usually connected to another workstation. The advantage of the networked printer, is that is does not have to rely upon any particular computer being on and functional to be able to print. So if your printers have network cards (ports) in them, they are network printers, but if they have to hooked up to a computer, then they are shared printers.

As far as Driveshield goes, the way I do things, is I create 2 partitions (C and D Drives). Then I set up drive shield to protect the c-drive and not protect the d-drive. Any programs that need to make changes to the drive (games and data driven programs) get installed on the D-drive (apps and data drive). Programs like MS Office and other programs where data is not an issue get installed on the C-Drive (system drive). Using this method, you reduce problems and increase computer up time. It is also much easier to keep your lab machines so they look and act the same, which usually makes things easier for instruction. Drive shield also reduces the chances and effects of spyware and viruses, because if the computer gets infected, all you have to do is reboot the machine and the infection is gone. We use Driveshield (but there are others) in all our labs now, and since we installed it, problems in all our labs has almost disappeared (all our problems now are usually physical and software).