Rolling Your Own Business Desktops?

mike asks: "I'm mulling the logic of my company building its own desktop computers. As the IT Manager (plus sysadmin, janitor...) of a struggling-yet-thankfully-still-alive dotcom, money is really tight. We have around sixty ~400MHz desktops which are increasingly showing their age. Acceptable P4 systems from the big guys run at least $1000. By recycling the OS (Win2k), case, cdrom, floppy, and K/V/M, I figure I can assemble a good AMD system for about $600. That's a 40% savings. Is it worth it? The cost difference could very well determine whether this project proceeds or gets put on the back-burner again."

"Some negatives about rolling my own:

• Management: I won't get the special business features offered by some manufacturers. Dell's OpenImage, for example, looks awfully nice. But how much does that really buy me in a company of 60 machines? I don't use such stuff now; am I missing out on nirvana?
• Time to build: Even though we'd leverage Ghost wherever possible, handmade systems nevertheless take time to build, load, & configure.
• Supporting different platforms: Because money is so tight, I can at best afford a capital replacement rate of 25%-33% (15-20 units) per year. That means I'm committing to the support of 3 or 4 different platforms. Having just one platform is great, but how many companies, even ones that actively strive for it, truly enjoy that luxury? I inherited two platforms (Micron & Gateway); support isn't that bad. With proper planning, I don't see why we can't support four.
• Hardware quality: How much can I trust a popular Athlon chipset in a business environment? I feel silly bringing this up because I have a few Athlon systems at home, each with a different chipset, and they've been nothing but rock solid. But I know the lack of a really good chipset has been a large contributor to why AMD's aren't more prevalent in the business world. (well, that and long term bullying by Intel).
• I don't get a proven, prepackaged system that works right out of the box.

Positives of rolling my own:

• Cost savings. Plain & simple.
• Increased horsepower per dollar spent.
• By choosing my own equipment (mobo especially), I suffer fewer OEM shortcuts.
• I have to admit that I'd enjoy the pure geek satisfaction of rolling out 'my' creation to the company.

So is it worth it, or am I setting myself up for disaster?"

For those that are curious, Ask Slashdot did an article on the AMD issue, here.

Microsoft allow it?

[mrmaster]

Will Microsoft even allow you to recycle your Win2k license on a new computer?

AMD is not the issue...

[joshamania]

...but Microsoft might be. You might want to take a look at the EULA from M$ and see if they allow the transfer of operating system. Not that I'm suggesting you follow that load of malarky, but it may be a consideration.

Personally, if they're just office type machines. Get Star Office and Linux and see what you can do. Experiment with a couple of your users to see how much trouble it might be.

Recycling

[airos4]

I really don't see a downside to the project... if you had a few people you trusted to help upgrade the systems, you could assembly line the upgrade and get things up and running in a couple weekends. The only things that I would see as a concern would be the age of power supplies, hard drives, etc. But if you do regular backups, that risk is minimized.

Don't forget service and support

[leshert]

If, two months from now, one of them dies and dies hard, you're on your own to figure out what went wrong, find a replacement part, try to get warranty service from wherever you bought that component, etc.

Most of the majors offer very good service. Often it's just a cross-ship for the whole system, and you're in business the next day with no time invested by your IT department.

$600? Surely you can do better than that.

[drinkypoo]

You can get a motherboard, CPU, and 256MB of ram for less than $400. For instance, access micro [accessmicro.com] (my favorite computer etailer) will sell you an abit AT7, athlonXP 1600+, 256MB of DDR333 memory, and a fan for $339 (with burn-in test.) $40 will get you a GF2MX 64MB SDR. pricewatch [pricewatch.com] indicates that WD 40GB EIDE disks (plenty for most applications) are down to $52 - Call it $75 for a disk, then, just for laughs.

Don't buy more processor than you need; It's expensive. You can always upgrade the CPU later if you pick a good platform. You can do the whole thing for about $450-$500 for each box.

Incidentally, I picked the GF2MX because it has good drivers and VERY fast 2D. If you are doing cad or something, get something from matrox, they have a much better DAC. The 3D is just icing.

Walmart PCs without Windows

[crow]

Perhaps you should consider Walmart's Microtel PCs without Windows [walmart.com]. Assuming you don't need software or monitors, you can get a 1GHz Celeron for $400. The trick is the legallity of transfering your Windows licenses (Which piece of the original computer does the license go with, the hard drive? Can you swap that piece into the new system). [Of course, if you could convert to Linux, that would be cool, but that's probably a separate battle.]

Re:Walmart PCs without Windows

[bool]

God, don't buy anything from walmart! http://alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12962

Re:Just one tech's opinion

[LtSmith]

Well, from what I have seen of dell's tech support for small businesses, one could easily diagnose - and repair a machine in the time it takes to get through their phone que.

Re:Microsoft allow it?

[rmadmin]

What constitutes it as being the same machine? If I take the ram stick out of the gateway and put it in the new machine, does that make the OEM still good? What if I change the mother board in the gateway, does that kill the OEM? Kinda curious on that one. =)

Licensing and parts Re:Walmart PCs without Windows

[new500]

. . .

Which piece of the original computer does the license go with, the hard drive?

I can answer that first one straight up : MS licenses software according to a complete configuration, usually specified according to model number.

Moreover, as I understand it, if Dell or whoever change *any* component specification, they have to seek a *new* license _every_ time this results in a materially different *system*. I understand that system is defined as mobo + processor, disks and ram et.c. don't have any effect. The system system (are you with me? :) is not mutually exclusive with the model number system of licensing - both seem to have simultaneous effect.

How do I know this?

Well a year or so back, I ordered up a bunch of IBM "M Pro" dual PIII/i840 machines for my company. Firstly, IBM were sharp enough to take our cash (yup that's cash by direct transfer to their account) stating they had shippable product. Rubbish. Weeks later we were still being fobbed off. So at that point I called the legal department at their regional HQ and pointed that they had a material breach of contract and had better sharpen up. We got our boxes pretty darn quick. But with NT4 loaded instead of Win2k. (we'd ordered W2k)

In trying to fix our fulfillment problems I had a direct line to their assembly/engineering management, so this info is near as dang it from the horses mouth. IBM couldn't just switch us a new license for Win2k. Moreover, once an OEM license is accepted by the end user (like when you power up and configure :) , you're bound by the same OEM terms. You are *supposed* to keep the base system.

Yup that sucks. FYI IBM set us up with a bunch of nice SCSI 18Gb 10k drives by way of apology, and the machines are rock solid, service since then good et.c. It was an interesting education.

As far as the real world goes - not that I advocate this - how exactly is MS going to be able to tell you replaced the whole underlying System?

If that made any sense to you, I guess it's a result! I'm too tired to unravel the rest of the gobbledygook that was pumped into my mind when I got irate and pressed for answers why I couldn't just get IBM to hand us the licenses we originally ordered.

Good luck to ya, hope the BSA doesn't catch you at anything you shouldn't be doing:-0

Re:$600? Surely you can do better than that.

[rnd()]

the parent post is dead on. Most slower machines will speed right up if you put in a sufficient amount of RAM.

After that, go after the processors, if they're upgradable.

Find some affordable hard drives and swap them out on the machines that are near capacity.

Invest the money you save into an upgrade plan based on an upcoming hardware platform, such as the Athlon T-bred, and watch the prices on RAM and buy in bulk when the price dips.

I think you're better off replacing the existing machines in thirds. First get rid of the most pesky third of the machines, cannabalize some RAM to improve the remaining 2/3. Then institute your new standard (whether its Dells or your self-built machines). You'll learn how to make the DIY approach efficient after the first 20 machines. In 6 months, you'll be able to buy equivalent machines at 2/3 of their current cost.

Benefits:
The business keeps more cash all along, and you make the absolute most out of the existing investment.

Cheap Summer Labor

[boopus]

One thing to add is that summer is almost upon us, and with that season comes many students looking for summer jobs. A couple fliers taken around to the local high school should get your plenty of high schoolers who'd be perfectly competent swapping motherboards/ram/hard drives. Ten bucks an hour to a high school student is better than flipping burgers, and far less than a salried employees time.

Get a Dell

[anewsome]

If you are going to pay $600 for these things, you would be better off getting a Dell. I paid about that much for a couple of 2Ghz P4 systems fairly well loaded.

My 2Ghz P4 Dells are:

• 256MB DDR Ram
• 80GB 7200RPM Maxtor HD
• Builtin Sound, Ethernet
• CD-RW Drive
• Full Tower case (solid)

I've been building clone boxes my whole life, but I couldn't pass this Dell up. This is pretty typical on Dell's site.

I usually check gotapex.com [gotapex.com] for deals.

Today they have a business class Dell P4 1.6GHz GX240 for $357.64 shipped. You can't build a loaded clone machine from scratch for that much, let alone one covered by a 3 year warranty.

Cluster 'em

[Rebel Patriot]

I know this is a little late, but here's a solution we've come up with that's in the cooker for some of our clients in a similar situation.

Basically you should invest $4,000 in a single server, RAID SCSI drives, dual athlon, 2 gigs of RAM. You've already got a 10/100 Mb backbone for your network, so you can slip this in just about anywhere.

Now here's where it gets fun. Load your favorite distro of linux, visit the Linux Terminal Server Project, and make a terminal server out of it. Then, check out MOSIX, or Sun's grid-computing (the later sports better redundancy, a feature I adore when working with end-users). Grab nics and boot-roms for each PC, install 'em, and boom, you've got a complete functioning cluster of what, 40 PII's? You have any idea the power those can muster?

Not only will you see a huge boost in computing power, but you also save money. Need to use quick books? What's a single liscence for Citrix cost? You can publish the app natively on your terminal server. Open Office works great for converting all those old MS documents.

Honestly, KDE 3.0 just came out. Use it. :-)

An entirely different option...

[rakeswell]

...which may or may not apply to your situation, but is something to think about if you are not a) totally married to Windows, b)it's not a huge network, and c) the network is otherwise well secured:

You can use old x486s as semi-dumb/thin clients to an app server using xdm -- the app server's X server just redirects the output to the users monitor.

I've set this up before and the performance is really very good. The x486s can have the OS installed locally so that they don't bog down the server booting from the network. Administration is centralized. Also, you can probably just keep using the workstation you have, otherwise, old boxes are cheap to find.

The downside of course is that it should only be done on a trusted network, etc. Again, if you need Windows, this is probably a useless idea.

roll your own

[clancey]

If you don't already know the answer, you probably aren't the one who should be building the new systems. Most companies I know only replace a portion of their hardware at a time.

Re:anti-static isn't over-hyped.

[pacman on prozac]

how many of those systems will die 2 years earlier down the line because of latent failures created when you worked on them. The FET transistors and high-density components in PC's are sensitive to static electricity. Just because it doesn't fail as soon as you plug it in doesn't mean you haven't damaged it. From the huge amount of faulty parts (RAM etc) I had when I was an engineer I'd guess lots of people in the industry don't bother with anti-static.

even more cost effective

[AoXoMoXoA]

It depends on what your users are doing...but lets do the math. If you are looking at 60 computers at roughly $600/upgrade. Why not take that $36,000 and roll it into a Win2k Terminal Server. You can build several nice multi-processor servers and let everyone connect via the client...make the server do the work. The only licensing concers would come in if you had any win9x boxes on the network. Win2k Pro shouldn't eat up a CAL. BTW...you can really lock the users down so they dont mess anything up or load those goofy screen savers and other crap.

Anti-static, Grounding, and ATX

[GigsVT]

I do the same, but just be careful. If you are working on an ATX system, and there is no "hard kill" switch on the back of it (a rocker switch usually), then the motherboard is still getting the 3.3 volt standby voltage. It's probably a bad idea to be plugging things in with this voltage on. That said, I've done it before, without apparent ill effect, but stil, probably not a good idea.

Another option if the PS doesn't have a hard kill switch is to plug it into a power strip that can be turned off, and just turn off the power strip, ground is NEVER broken in a properly designed electrical system, even when things are turned off. Of course if you broke off your ground priong so you could plug your computer in to your 60 year old house wiring, all bets are off. :)

In the case of the broken ground, watch out, switching power supplies without ground float the chassis around 60 volts at low current, enough to wake you up if you are a better ground than whatever the case is sitting on, but probably not too dangerous, UNLESS there is a malfunction in the power supply, in which case you could become a crispy critter. In any case, good ground is a good idea, lots of things are affected badly by floating grounds.

This same thing applies when you use a UPS and just pull the plug out to test it, without that ground reference, the ground will float, so watch out.

As far as the "to unplug or not to unplug" debate, there is probably a credible argument that even though you don't have a good ground when the case if off and unplugged, things like static electricity will dissipate whenever you touch a large metal object like the chassis, due to leakage effects.

Not worth it.

[smoon]

I used to run a small computer shop -- 30-100 PCs a month kind of place.

We used to do hand-builds, then eventually switched to getting 'mostly configured' systems we could then further customize for the customer.

_If_ you know exactly what you're doing, _and_ you have a number of good contacts with various suppliers, _and_ you get a good batch of parts with no incompatabilities -- in other words, best case scenario you will have:

A: A big pile of boxes to assemble. The days of jumpers and whatnot are mostly gone, but you still need to figure out how everything fits together, do it 10, 20, 30, whatever times in a row, and never break anything or have a DOA part. And even though there probably aren't a lot of jumpers, there are still finicky CMOS settings to set correctly and equivalently on all of the machines.

B: To then load everything. This is generally best done on one 'master' system with that disk image 'ghosted' onto the other hard drives. Sounds simple, but setting up that master image properly can take a while. Perhaps you'd have to do this with a Dell anyway. YMMV.

C: To deal with any integration problems -- hard drive fails? Call the hard drive vendor. Flaky problems? Oops, you couldn't afford a RAM tester or other diagnostic equipment, and so you play the swap-out game -- you pretty much need a complete computer on the side for this kind of troubleshooting. And a _lot_ of time on your hands.

And this is absolute best case. The crackpot idea of upgrading the mobo in place and re-using the hard drive, video, etc. is fine in principle, but in practice doesn't scale beyond the one-off home hobbyist sort of thing.

Worst case is that you buy parts for perhaps 20 systems, get about 14 built, RMA 3-4 hard drives, have some strange driver problems with the video cards, and get 2-3 variations of motherboard --- rev. 1, rev. 2, one yellow one green -- whatever, RAM seems to be flaky, but you're not sure if it's a CMOS setting or a bad MOBO or a bad RAM module, and if the latter, which one it might be. Start chewing through all of the permutations and eventually you figure it out and maybe get 18 of the original 20 built, the other two are constantly rotated with various users as their desktops crap out.

IMHO other than for home hobbyist use, getting a Dell/IBM/Compaq/Gateway/HP/insert favorite brand here/whatever computer beats the heck out of a roll-your-own system.

Perhaps you can get the best of both worlds?

[wizman]

If you're looking at a $400 difference, perhaps you can recoup some of that by selling off the old systems at auction. I'm sure they're worth $200-$300. Then you have the benefits of new supported machines from the big guys, without the hassles of supporting your own systems, and the cost factor is minimalized.

Just be sure to erase those drives several times, and make sure you conform to whatever license transfer blah blah M$ wants.

Why not lease?

[Digital Soldier]

I posted earlier in support of buying new PC's. Just thought I'd throw out another idea: lease them. Given that PC's are business tools that aren't going away, you might be better off with a 24 month lease. Though terms of the lease itself would indicate whether it was beneficial or not. Your company avoids the initial expenditure of funds to purchase your own PC's. Just a thought.

Re:Don't forget service and support

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I've had excellent results from Dell tech support. I actually got useful information from them on several occasions over the phone, which astounds me. (I usually expect phone tech support people to be still unsure of the difference between ENTER and RETURN.) They *will* come out and fix desktops, too, if you buy the right maintenance contract.

The danger of building a machine from components is that if something doesn't work, the individual component manufacturers can all point at each other and you'll never get anything replaced. There are benefits to having one person you can blame.

My 2 cents

[Dragoness Eclectic]

I am commenting as someone who has scratch-built many PCs, both for home and business use. First, I'll assume you know what your needs are, and not try to tell you that your 400 Mhz Pentiums are just fine. You said you need to upgrade, I'll take your word for it. I'm also not going to tell you exactly what you should buy, I assume you know what you need/want. And your Win2K license terms aren't my problem, either. Other people have also commented well on anti-static issues.

First, don't start this job until you are comfortable tearing computers apart and putting them back together. Building and repairing computers is fairly simple these days, when everything is componentized, but you do have to know what you are doing. You need to be able to understand those motherboard manuals and figure out what jumpers and BIOS settings you need for your particular configuration. You need to be able to screw motherboards into place and shove cards into slots without breaking them or slicing yourself open on the chassis (I swear every one of my personal computers is christened with my blood!), and plug cables in right-side up. All simple things to learn, but they can be expensive and frustrating to learn the hard way. If you're not comfortable doing these things, don't plan on building 60 PCs yourself. Farm the job out to a good local vendor or technician who is.

Line up a good vendor, either local or mail order, who can sell you what you need, when you need it (finding out replacement parts are unavailable or back-ordered for a month when you need them NOW is not helpful), at a satisfactory price and with a no-hassle return policy--because you will be returning bad components when you order enough for 60 PCs--unless you pay the higher price for a vendor that does 24-hour burn-in. Even then you may not weed out all the bad components.

Make your PCs as much alike as possible--it's easier to assemble a cookie-cutter configuration, and of course, ghosting a Win installation works a lot better if you're using the same drivers from computer to computer. As others have mentioned, don't cheap out on the components! Good quality, name-brand components are worth paying a few dollars extra for; you get fewer returns and mysterious failures, and name-brand quality components are more likely to actually follow the industry specs for whatever device they are, instead of cutting corners the way cheap components sometimes do. BTW, this is where you win over buying cheap pre-built computers: guys like Gateway and those Wal-Mart computers save money by putting the absolutely cheapest, bottom-of-the-line, no-name commodity parts in their computers. That's how they can sell them so cheap. Sometimes it works; back in the early 90s, the favorite no-name graphics card used in our company's computers had the Cirrus Logic chipset, which was a moderately accellerated, halfway decent graphics card
that actually had OS/2 drivers (which we were using). Usually, you have the problem with discount computers that the cheapest no-name card changes from week to week, so this week's discount computer may have entirely different components and drivers than last week's discount computer, even though they are supposedly the same model. Now that is a major hassle in the support department!

OTOH, some parts are so commodity that it doesn't matter. Who cares what brand floppy drive you buy? It's a mature technology and they all work alike. IDE CD-ROM drives are much the same way. IDE hard drives are NOT. Neither are SCSI drives.
I personally like Western Digital IDE drives and won't touch a Quantum if I can help it; YMMV.

If you're using AMD Athlons or similar chips, invest in a slot fan or bay fan in addition to the CPU fan. If the noise of all those fans is likely to drive people postal in a week, consider spending the extra dollars for low-noise fans.

So, you've got a vendor or three, and you've got a list of parts that meet your criteria for price, performance and quality. To lower your own frustration level, make sure you have plenty of tools; those Phillips-head screwdrivers and nut drivers seem to migrate of their own accord whenever you're not holding them in hand. Also, make sure you have plenty of small screws of various sizes, spare Y-junction internal power cables, and spare IDE cables. Save any leftover small screws that came with cases or whatever; you'll need them sooner or later. Spare mounting rails of various flavors are nice to have around; vendors never seem to ship the right mounting rails for your chassis, if they bother to ship mounting rails at all with the drives. If you are lucky, your chassis's don't need mounting rails at all, but support drives being bolted directly to the chassis. Wish mine did.

If an IDE drive doesn't work, check your master/slave jumper settings first, then the IDE cable (that's why you need spares--I've had a lot more bad cables than I ever had bad drives). Keep a "known good" AGP card around to test out the AGP slot when you think you have a bad graphics card--I've had more bad AGP slots on motherboards than I've had bad graphics cards or bad monitors.
Ditto for memory and memory sockets. (The quality control on certain brands *cough*SOYO*cough* of VIA-chipset motherboards was a bit off...) Also, watch the fun-n-games of putting PCI cards that don't share interrupts happily (NIC & AGP combo, particularly) in the wrong slots.

Being able to ghost the first OS + software installation onto all subsequent PCs is a major time and hassle saver.

As for "support" issues, if you can put together the PCs yourself, you can handle most support issues yourself. PC hardware is commoditized and componentized, and a hell of a lot easier to support than PC software. Keep "known good" components around for troubleshooting, and have spares of everything on hand, including and especially power supplies. (Make sure you get an adequate power supply in the first place).

Anyway, hope this helps.....