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Hardware IT

Companies Keeping Systems Longer Than Ever 38

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the penny-pinching-till-lincoln-cries dept.
Ant writes to tell us ComputerWorld is reporting that based on a study done by the Yakee Group Research company out of Boston companies are leveraging the durability and reliability of computers to extend the lifespan of desktops, laptops, and servers. From the article: "IT's life-cycle demands have raised the bar for vendors. "There's more pressure on [the vendors] to make the boxes last a longer period of time."
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Companies Keeping Systems Longer Than Ever More

Companies Keeping Systems Longer Than Ever

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  • Why should I upgrade? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mnmn ( 145599 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @01:18AM (#14135422) Homepage
    We're using Windows 2000 Pentium-III machines for the most part in the company. We just have no real motivation to start using Windows XP or 2003 server anytime soon. (Apart from the fact that some of our apps will in time force us to upgrade).

    Most applications require Windows NT/2000/XP, which means they can still run on the older Windows NT 4.0 machines. So why upgrade?

    I think microsoft dug themselves in a hole with Windows 2000. Its everything companies need, and Windows XP offers not a whole lot more.. (prettier screens? faster bootup? DirectX 9.0c?) Most app vendors have standardized on Windows 2000, and Microsoft will have a tough time to force them to Windows XP alone, or Longhorn, which will force customers to get new hardware as well. In doing so, they'll also force some app vendors to more to Linux, which will happily and freely run on older hardware. Time to sell that Microsoft stock.

    • Re:Why should I upgrade? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by baldass_newbie ( 136609 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @01:29AM (#14135459) Homepage Journal
      First off, Editor, it's "Yankee" and not "Yakee". RTFA.

      To the First Poster's point, the bigger question is whether or not Longhorn will force massive code rewrites. People got sucked into the hype with Windows 95 and 32-bit, but it killed a lot of small to midsize software builders which is the basis for a lot of anti-MicroSoft sentiment.

      Will web-based applications require a rebuild? (The web being the obvious weapons of choice.) Better yet, will Longhorn try to cripple Apache? (I have a dollar that says 'yes' -- for 'security reasons', too.)

      And you forgot one reason why managers will go away from WIndows 2K -- SharePoint. I have a Win2K machine, one of the last in my organization, and I can't connect to ANY of our SharePoint work. CIO doesn't care, says he won't be supporting Win2K in a few more months. Lucky me, I get one of the laptops of my friends who just got fired in the recent RIF. Yipee.

    • Re:Why should I upgrade? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by plover ( 150551 ) * on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @02:04AM (#14135598) Homepage Journal
      Microsoft is all over us to move to .NET but, their hardware requirements are for 400MHz processors. Our least-common denominator is a lot of 266MHz, 128MB RAM machines. There really is no chance to make .NET perform acceptably on those old boxes. But since the only people with a real interest in moving us to .NET seems to be the Microsoft consultants, nothing much is happening on that front anyway.
      • It's clear I drink the kool-aid when I ask: are ReactOS [reactos.com] and Mono [mono-project.com]/DotGNU [dotgnu.org] viable alternatives which would allow you to continue using this hardware?
        • Haven't tried, and honestly we won't. Two reasons: One, Microsoft is very committed to squeezing performance out of .NET. It can even execute faster than C code in some artificial benchmarking situations. I believe they're better suited to making it work for us than Mono. The other reason is we're very tied to Microsoft OSes at this point. There is a river of Koolaid running through the hallways here, and it flows into the director's offices. But thanks for the hopeful thoughts anyway.
    • I was going to comment . .

      . . . but you pretty much nailed it.

  • Investment in Software (Score:4, Insightful)

    by under_score ( 65824 ) <mishkin@be[ ]ig.com ['rte' in gap]> on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @01:27AM (#14135449) Homepage
    Also drives this need to keep hardware around longer. A major piece of software for internal corporate IT might take several years to build, and then last a couple of decades. Suddenly it becomes important to have a fairly stable hardware environment.
  • I run a relatively lightly used academic server. We used to run it off a Sun Ultra 10, 440 megahertz. A year or two ago we ended up replacing it with a new Linux box for a variety of reasons, including a hard-to-diagnose hardware failure (which now it appears may be limited to the hard drives, so we may yet recycle the box, heh) and the fact that not many people are familiar specifically with Solaris...

    So we bought a new middling-low-end server from IBM, 1U, Opteron... The manager of the site basically aske

  • Why upgrade? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Centurix ( 249778 ) <centurixNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @01:28AM (#14135453) Homepage
    W2K does everything we need right now for both developers and users in the company. The only reason I can think of to upgrade would be ongoing support from Microsoft for the platform. We call them once in a blue moon, mainly due to there being so much information elsewhere for most domestic stuff, only calling them when something weird goes on with something like Exchange (which is an expensive call in itself and not related to our desktop installs). We don't need the Fisher Price interface just something that works so we don't have to fix it.

    If you went to our CIO and said "We need to upgrade all our PC's to XP" and gave one reason, even if it's a good one, he'd get out the calculator and say no. It would have to be a reason like "We have to upgrade to XP otherwise the company will explode killing all executive management". Then he'd probably sign a check.

  • It's the Applications, stupid (Score:4, Interesting)

    by meta-monkey ( 321000 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @01:36AM (#14135481) Journal
    What are most people in offices doing? Email, a little Word and Excel. How much power do you need to do that? If the machines aren't broken, and they're letting people do their jobs, then what's the impetus to make managers spend the money for upgrades? Unless you're doing heavy-duty number crunching or playing the latest and greatest video games, there's no reason to have the top of the line machine.

  • Which is why... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by keesh ( 202812 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @01:36AM (#14135482) Homepage
    ...I'm having a hard time getting over a one year warranty on IDE drives. I'll start to believe that people care about hardware lifespan when SCSI drives with a five year warranty start to become the norm again.

    • Re:Which is why... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Seagate has a standard 5 year warranty on their entire ide product line. Western Digital (and I believe Maxtor) offer 3 year warranties on their "special edition" drives.
      • All manufacturers have gone back to a 3 or 5 year warranty(thanks to pressure from Seagate's standard 5 year).

        Maxtor and Western Digital offer 3 years on most drives and 5 years on the premium drives. Seagate offers 5 years across the board. Samsung is 3 years across the board. Hitachi is a mix, some drives have 1 year(OEM), most have 3 year, enterprise(SCSI) have 5 year.
    • Hard drives are overrated.

      I manage 60+ Linux boxes with a total of zero harddrives between them (via etherboot/pxe and "X -query $server").

      These computers are as old as 75 mhz Pentiums, and other than bootup, run like a new machine. The only pieces of hardware that I have to replace are cpu, case, and power supply fans (with the rogue blown cpu or power supply when I don't replace a fan when it fails).

      Dust is my only enemy.

  • For a variety of reasons, IT at work has given to me a Windows 2000 Desktop system that's 5+ years old. (HP Vectra VL).

    It has a randomly failing hard drive. Sometimes, the system won't recognize the hard drive, so it helps to pull the cord and rock the system back and forth, left and right. If this doesn't work, disconnecting the hard drive and cleaning the IDE cable as well as the power cable to the HD with compressed air usually does the trick. (I also spray the fan, the RAM, and anything else dusty w
    • To move hard drives, use Norton Ghost. Chances are, your IT department already has a few copies of that utility.
      • Or use knoppix and dd.

        But you better know what you are doing.

        I recommend copying critical files to somewhere else first. Then only do the drive to drive copy.

        When you boot on the cloned drive, you should probably start in safe mode first and let windows rerecognize the hardware etc - because the hard drive will likely have a different model number/id.

        If it's Windows XP or some other similar version you might have problems with windows activation etc.

        Windows 2K should be ok.
        • dd won't do it, unless the drives are identical. Ghost can move drives even if you are moving an NTFS partition from, say, a 20 gig to a 160 gig. I don't think there is any other program which can do that, open source or otherwise.

          • Partimage can do this, it can't move to a smaller drive, but it can move to a same size or larger. I've actually managed to move to a smaller drive, but I have to shrink the partition, then resize it after it is moved. It's a pain.
          • Why not? As long as the destination drive is bigger you can do it with dd.

            I've done it MANY times. You just end up with a unused, unpartitioned space on the destination drive. You can partition that and use the space.

            I believe an advantage of Ghost is you can do it when the dest drive is _smaller_, given some other constraints (disk usage etc).

            • You just end up with a unused, unpartitioned space on the destination drive.

              Why would you want that? Generally, people want one big partition, not a bunch of smaller ones.
              • That's irrelevant to: "Suggestions for Slowly Failing Hard Drive?".

                The whole point is getting a copy of your data on another drive that isn't going to fail soon.

                You claimed dd didn't work if the drives weren't identical.

                Even if the O/S/application locks itself to particular drive (see "Windows activation" etc ), it gives you more options.

                You still have a backup of your entire drive (assuming your drive is still readable as a whole- just grumbling a lot about having to retry reads etc, if your drive isn't th
    • Get rid of the POS Vectra.... those things have defective motherboards, disc controllers and hard disks.

      Do yourself a favor and dump some water on the mainboard on Friday afternoon, call it in on Monday when things dry off.

  • An engineering firm I worked at recently upgraded their dozens of PCs to AMD 64s and XP. The BSOD problem is largely dead. They won't be needing to update machines for probably 5 years.

    The last blue screen problem I had with XP was due to a fan failure. More annoying is when Firefox freezes (due to memory issues?) but session saver fixes that most times.

  • They run as fast as the day they were bought (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Radical Rad ( 138892 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2005 @01:52AM (#14135552) Homepage
    Why get rid of perfectly good equipment? The major reasons I have seen for PCs to run slowly is:
    1. Spyware/adware.
    2. Antivirus scanners/firewalls/spam filters taking up most of the RAM.
    3. Unnecessary software getting loaded every time the user plugs in a new printer or USB device. You can't just load drivers anymore. The user is prompted to insert a CD which installs gobs of crap, many of which are not even full apps but trial versions. It is just submarine marketing.
    4. Fragmentation. I still remember the good old days when Microsloth claimed that NTFS doesn't fragment.
    5. "Upgrading" the system from the OS it was designed for to anything newer, i.e. 98 to 2000 or 2000 to XP.

    A few years ago I loaded some version of DOS, WordPerfect, and Lotus 1-2-3 on an old 386/25 laptop. I was blown away by how fast it booted up and by how fast the apps ran. Recalculating a spreadsheet took a fraction of a second instead of the microseconds it takes on my new system, but scrolling around a sheet full of data went so fast that I couldn't even stop where I wanted to. Instead of scrolling over to column G for example I kept overshooting and ending up at like column AK. Windows and Windows apps seem designed to slowly bury your PC under an avalanche of bloat forcing you to upgrade the hardware just to stay even. If this gets modded redundant it's only because everyone knows it's true.

    I just retired two servers that were with the company longer than me. They had NetWare 3.12 on them when I got there and NetWare 5.1 when I removed them from the tree. After about eight years of service they had only gone through two OS upgrades.
    • We ran some AIX servers under 3.2.5 until a year or so back. We'd replaced harddrives a few times (the last time with wide drives with narrow adapters), but finally upgraded mainly out of paranoia. They wouldn't run AIX 4, IBM wasn't patching 3.2.5, and they were too slow to use as compute servers, even for teaching. (simulation codes also get larger with age, and we wanted to keep current with what the research groups were using). Rather than wait for them to get Rooted, we turned them off and bought re
  • whats wront with my Celeron 300A, 128RAM and 3GB hdd ?

    Altrough it does not run the last Redmond OS ! .. but cant be bodered with such nonsense.

    No BIOS updates, cant mount HDD >32Gb, cant bay >40Gb.
    Do I need a new system ? Oh my God I do need a NEW system..

    ---
    apt-get update;
    • I think linux will read your >32GB disks just fine.

      • I think linux will read your >32GB disks just fine.

        Linux (or even Windows NT/2000/XP for that matter) is not the problem. The problem is that some old BIOSes freak out on those disks and refuse to boot. The OS doesn't matter if you can't even read the boot sector.

  • I'd say one reason is the declining acceleration of CPU's

    It's harder and harder to get the "usual" increase in processor speed due to issues with heat dissapation, and perhaps even the speed of light.

    Light is fast, 5878499810000 miles in a year, but in 1/4000000000th of a second (4Ghz) it only goes 7.4 centimeters. You can cram the components really close together, with really short wires, but that just concentrates the heat produced, and I doubt a CPU would work properly when it's gold contacts turn into a

  • Sounds a lot like everyone elses work. Sounds like a lot of people out there are using PIII machines with Win2K on them. To be honest though I don't really need anymore than what I have. I can browse the net with 50 tabs open in mozilla, have notepad open, be downloading a couple different torrents, have my three work related apps open, and trillian running all at the same time with not too much of a slow down.

  • We use p3-500's. They put in a terminal server that is fast and everyone connects to that. Its a good solution I guess and it saves money rather then upgrading all the systems in the room. Those with the cost of PC's today its not that expensive to upgrade.
  • I have two AMD XP 2500+ systems, one running FC3 and one with XP. They're both quick, and do everything I need. However, 90% of the time I'm running FC3 on my PII 300 Notebook with 256MB/ram and a 6GB HD. It's plenty for everything I do. The screen is nice, the keyboard is nice, everything loads fairily on par with my other FC3 system (except for Firefox, but once it loads it works well), It's portable, Everything on it is supported by FC3 and even wireless works well.

    Everyonce in a while I find myself lo

  • The equipment and software are bought and paid for; why would a compnay lay out good money for new, when the old is up, running, working, and allowing people to be productive? It's inconvenient when you come to work one day and they've decided to replace your desktop box or upgrade the software and you spend the better part of your work week reconfiguring your system to do everything your old system did, only to discover you can't go back. Then more time is wasted learning how to do things on the new system

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