UK Government Spending £6,000 Per Computer Every Year To Maintain Desktops 193
girlmad writes "The UK government's chief operating officer Stephen Kelly offered a frightening insight into the world of government IT spending this week. According to Kelly, the government spends £6,000 per year per PC just to maintain the devices, and wastes 3 days per year per person due to slow boot-up times."
How is this even possible? (Score:3)
What exactly is "maintaining"? I've spent nothing on "Maintaining" my PC for some six years. And you can buy four PC's for that fee. And you can get a techie at $20 an hour for five hours a month every other month, so call it $500 per year. (Skipping currency games.)
So can we all have a piece of that slush fund?
Re:How is this even possible? (Score:4, Interesting)
In a business,
You need to test the patch before you allow it to propogate everywhere.
At a minimum, for every tuesday patch, you have 1 person patching a representative sample of your computers and then after seeing the computers still work postpatch, setting up the patch to propagate.
Assuming a 40,000 pound salary for one expert employee... and then another 50,000 pound salary for a back up... costs add up quickly.
Re:How is this even possible? (Score:5, Insightful)
Those particular costs are shared among a relatively large number of PC's however.
Even if you have a thousands of PC's, you wouldn't need more than that handful of experts to test patches and maintain the backups.
If their setup is even remotely sane, all labor-intensive work on location would be low-skilled.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Extraordinary claims and all that... (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me that the point of the article is to convince people that, and I quote, "it looks like the government is getting completely swindled by their PC supplier". The whole story smells of "negotiation by press release" to me, are the big IT contracts coming up for renewal by any chance?
Re:Guess you didn't read the artice (Score:4, Informative)
The title says absolutely nothing about WHY it costs 6000 pounds/year/desktop.
Re:Guess you didn't read the artice (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Because guessing is a wonderful way to a full understanding of any situation.
He's in good company, Feynman taught his students that guessing was the first step in the scientific method [youtube.com], besides where else can you start?
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty sure it includes the salary of some useless middle and upper managers in that number.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
"Assuming a 40,000 pound salary for one expert employee"
Hah.
Re: (Score:2)
They're civil servants, they don't get anywhere near industry rates, even as specialists. It's only the very senior civil servants who get stupid pay (and even they're underpaid by industry standards). They do, however, get index linked pensions to make up for it.
Re:How is this even possible? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. That isn't the cost of using anything, it's one (or more) of the following:
- Made up numbers
- Wrongly calculated costs
- Huge useless management overhead
- General spending incompetence
- Overpriced licenses (e.g. "must have full Adobe Creative Suite on all PCs and upgrade it yearly")
- Users being dumb shits who break their computers on a weekly basis
All the above has little to nothing to do with which OS is being used.
Re: (Score:2)
In all likelihood, it's the result of a political game to try to avoid the blame for massive cost overruns in a loosely related project which is funded under the same umbrella account/fund.
Re: (Score:3)
Patch Tuesday? Patch Management is an issue that affects all platforms and requires professional support regardless of your operating system. It also involves all of your applications and that easily requires as much work as the OS itself. There is nothing special about Microsoft in this regard. Half my fleet is OS X and I've implemented Patch Management to support Unix and Linux over the years.
Your either talking out of your ass or simply incompetent by thinking you don't need to patch your environment.
Re: (Score:2)
Considering I've managed quite a few thousand thin clients over the years I think I'm on pretty firm ground. Thin clients booting over PXE have been around for a very long time. There is absolutely nothing about thin clients that changes any of my points.
Re: (Score:2)
That's valid for any OS. All OSs get patches and all patches, regardless of the OS, need to be tested for compliance. Furthermore, a pretty small subset of employees are handling those, and the costs are not nearly enough to justify 6K pounds per machine per year, again, regardless of which OS is used.
Re: (Score:2)
Usually, Jacob is the user.
Re: (Score:3)
What exactly is "maintaining"? I've spent nothing on "Maintaining" my PC for some six years. And you can buy four PC's for that fee. And you can get a techie at $20 an hour for five hours a month every other month, so call it $500 per year. (Skipping currency games.)
Their considering boot times to be costs. That should tell you how much bollocks is in the article (I, like any true /.er haven't read it).
Actual overheads are probably much lower.
Also which government department, the amount of security around any MOD installation would easily reach or exceed 6000 GBP in overheads, but very few departments would have this onerous requirement.
Re:How is this even possible? (Score:5, Funny)
(I, like any true /.er haven't read it)
Read what?
Re: (Score:2)
All of the above (and below)
Re: (Score:2)
"Their considering boot times to be costs. That should tell you how much bollocks is in the article (I, like any true /.er haven't read it)."
It's government computers. They cannot just make the machines go to sleep instead of powering them down in the evening, sleeping on the job is frowned upon.
IT Crowd (Score:3)
Their considering boot times to be costs.
When I read this in a story about UK, reminded me of the simple question. Have you tried turning it off and on? [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
For security reasons I would like a feature "download profile and lock computer" because I am often not at my desk when the login is complete.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Although I do get bored easily, I can and do Wait For It. I just try not to wait for IT.
Re: (Score:2)
It's also very dangerous for job stability of IT people if they create or maintain an environment where the users have to work around a lot of flaws - it means a "computer ate my homework" lie when someone fails to finish a critical project in time gets believed and the IT guy gets sacked. Out of any workplace with a few dozen people you are bound to get someone that will try that eventually unless you have an environme
Re: (Score:2)
Roaming profiles may be a good idea, but when some flaw turns them into crawling profiles then either the bottlenecks need to be found or the idea needs to be given up on in favour of something local enough to work before the user gets bored and wanders off.
It's not isolated to Windows - if your Linux/OSX setup has your home folder on the network, and the network is crap, then you'll still get performance issues.
Re: (Score:2)
Also the network shouldn't be crap in 2013. Networking gear is cheap away from the very top end, disks are cheap, memory on fileservers or
Re: (Score:2)
I know that
I guessed you did - my post was more for general info rather than aimed at any one person.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, I just saw it as an ignorant fanboy dig at a rival group of fans but did my best to remain polite anyway.
If only more people were like that. I am many things, but a fanboy I am not :) Roaming profiles are one of the weakest parts of modern Windows, and it should be fairly high on MS's todo list to improve them, rather than worry about how best to force users to Metro.
Re: (Score:2)
If and when the situation arises that I can't leave the computer during booting I will be damn sure to kick the financial administration into giving me a project number to write those minutes on.
By the way, I also walk away during the booting itself (pre-logon). I just come back to logon and walk away again.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Because not shutting down your PC every night means you never reboot to install updates right?
Re:How is this even possible? (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess it does depend on what is classed as maintaining as you say and I'm not sure what sections of government they're referring too.
I can however speak for local government, specifically my local council and whilst it differs council by council I can quite imagine it for mine.
At my local council around 2009 they were paying £28k for bottom of the rung helpdesk/front line support monkeys, and they upped their wages to £32k around 2009 - 2010 right at the height of the recession when they were axing outright other departments and services. For reference the equivalent member of staff in private sector with an equivalent degree of competence and responsibilities would be paid around the £18k - £20k mark in this region so they were paying £12k - £14k a year premium for each member of support staff alone and there was a decent number of them. If support costs are factored into this figure then I can full well imagine grossly over-inflated wages in at least some IT departments across the spectrum of government departments across the UK is a big factor.
Further to this, in 2011 the council decided, again, whilst making cuts to real actual useful services to blow a few million on upgrading everyone from Office 2007 to Office 2010, because of course that was totally worth it, I mean Office 2010 was so fundamentally different that despite being at the height of an austerity drive and despite having to cut useful services and despite cutting funding for real actual problems like 1 foot deep potholes and so forth it was essential that all staff got bumped from 2007 to 2010. Oh, and of course they hired a bunch of people on £32k a year to install it, because of course you need people paid a 23% premium over the national average wage in a relatively cheap part of the country to stick a CD in and click next next next a few times rather than just get your existing well paid support team to just install it remotely using the city-wide fibre network you'd built to every single satellite office a few years beforehand. It's all this sort of wastage that causes that figure.
Put simply, if my local council is representative of government in general then I'd say the £6k is probably about right because for some reason they have a hard-on for IT and all common sense and fiscal responsibility just goes right out the window. Government has enforced public sector pay rise increase limitations of 0% for a few years and 1% some years after so the wages issue at least will begin to be dealt with via inflation if they keep that up, though the problem is it's a blanket thing so unfairly harms government roles that were underpaid but this is typical of our current government's cuts - rather than grappling the fundamental issues of wastage and overpayment in some areas they just demand blanket cuts and let local councils get on with it even though many are way too lacking in competence to do it sensibly. The net result is reports like this - highlighting the disturbing levels of wastage in some areas.
I'm just glad I'm not paying council tax to that particular council any more at least though I've no idea what expenditure on this sort of thing is like at my current council as I don't know anyone that works there.
Re: (Score:2)
Is it just me who find it outrageous that councils are using these excuse for a software, like Office suit and all that, and piling up costs to update and maintain them, while a fucking free text editor do the job, on a lower spec pc, with little to no maintenance costs?
I mean, there's a host of reliable, powerful and well supported tool for all the stuff that a normal office person does: emailing, writing documents: plain text editing is at the heart of writing a document, formatting is only a secondary th
Re: (Score:2)
"Except you would pay someone that wage to come in and deploy to your PCs via an automated method, especially if your current IT has no experience with that product."
One person at £32k is still cheaper than 10 people at £320k and given that they have a lot of computers at different sites they damn well should (and for what it's worth do) have staff trained in remote deployment and the software and infrastructure to do it. They just opted to send people around physically instead.
"For
Re: (Score:2)
The reality there is that at a guess 95% of their staff could get by with something as simple as Wordpad, not that I'm advocating they just use that but certainly to give you an idea of the level of complexity they need in their office suite - i.e. pretty much none.
That's why switching to 2010 struck me as particularly wasteful, there was really nothing in it that I suspect anything other than maybe 2 or 3 out of the 5000 staff they employ would use.
I'll be honest and say I'm not entirely sure why they paid
Re: (Score:2)
Considering this is a government figure making a statement, I'm guessing there's some spin on this figure. I would bet money this is basically the entire IT budget divided by the number of computers provided that aren't in the IT department. It probably includes support staff salaries, building maintenance and rent on the call centres and offices, infrastructure/server setup costs (amortized over x years) and warranties for everything down to the Biro he doodled on while drinking his first cup of tea while
Re: (Score:3)
Re:How is this even possible? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the UK government doesn't pay for support by the hour, they have established support contracts in place with several large UK companies.
The "hack job" of an article "forgets" that desktop prices include all the network infrastructure and the standard software packs. Switch ports, uplinks etc and the aforementioned support in place
The hack job article only touches lightly on the software costs of major application providers but fails to mention the amount of support required to maintain the crap that a lot of Government writes for itself... which is a lot of the most god awful crap.
The hack job of an article also fails to mention the rules and conditions that they, themselves, impose of desktop requirements. A vast amount of UK Government is required to operate at IL2 and IL3 security impact levels. Everything that touches said network, must be accredited to that security level. All software, all network, everything... EAL4/EAL4+ infrastructure is not cheap because of what the worlds Governments demand the manufacturers.
So, this article is complete crap, written by someone with no obvious understanding of the technical and security requirements and by stating "just buy iPads" she has told the world that she really does know nothing about large infrastructure design, planning and implementation.
Bit too harsh (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I've been an infrastructure architect for environments that include heavy government regulation at multiple large enterprises. I've dealt with everything from HIPAA, DOD, SOX, PCI, FERPA, FDA and so on. I've also worked a fair bit Euro and Asian regulatory environments at multinationals. I've done these things at environments from large health insurance companies to financial companies at stock exchanges to working with DOD contractors to large multinational pharmaceuticals.
There is no reason for their supp
Re: (Score:2)
Having used the ITIL process, I'm sure ITIL is largely to blame for this.
Re: (Score:2)
Our accounting department has a $40,000 a year licensing fee for the software they use.
Guarantee Govt has special vertical market software that costs as much.
Re: (Score:2)
This is more like it.
Let's say this Gov Department is DVLA,. who maintain the database of vehicles and drivers registrations and licensing. They probably have a call centre / processing staff of a few thousand users. plus some management etc.
If you included the cost of maintaining that rather sensitive and important database as "IT" and divided it by the 2000 users and get £6000 then you get something like £12M a year. Which quite frankly for that sort of database is pretty cheap. I'd imagine
Re: (Score:2)
You're mis-attributing statements in the article:
This is, I admit, rather ambiguous, but since the very next paragraph begins:
He
Re:How is this even possible? (Score:4, Funny)
They pay 2 dingos and a bushman a month.
Re: (Score:2)
How much is a Dingo in AUD? Is that 10 or 100 Vegemites?
Kelly could be quite right (Score:2)
I believe the writer of the article does not consider enterprise items like geo-redundant infrastructure, storage, backup, auditing compliance and enterprise level servers. The majority of the cost is probably generated by slow IT processes to change, acquire and deploy software or features. A lot of meetings and paperwork is often needed and those people need to be paid also. A lot of large organizations do not know the meaning of the word "agile".
Re: (Score:2)
Mixture of things.
They probably ignored software costs (those multimillion pound installs of some boring package to bo boring, non ipaddy yet essential things, like you know, actually paying staff), the massive networking requirements for that many PCs (much of the network is older than the modern public infrastructure based internet and you can't just switch 500,000 computers with ease). Actually there was an article about exactly that on slashdot a while back. And severs, redundancy and such features for
Re: (Score:2)
The cost of upgrading from XP would be used as a reason for not doing so; after all it costs £6k *right now* to not upgrade...
Re: (Score:2)
A lot of large organizations do not know the meaning of the word "agile".
A general trait of large organisms is a lack of agility.
Re: (Score:2)
..and ignored the requirement for greater security (iPads have only recently been certified for IL3 and not above) and the fact that a large majority of the software the government uses is Windows only and/or custom and will not run on an iPad at all ...
Huh? (Score:2)
offered a frightening insight into the world of government IT spending this week.
Is there some reason he thinks government employees waste any more time dicking around with computers than private sector computers do?
Also, whenever people start screeching about how much computers are costing us, stop to think how much it would cost us to go back to doing things the way we did 50 years ago. Want to run a government agency or a megacorporation with typewriters and filing cabinets?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Is there some reason he thinks government employees waste any more time dicking around with computers than private sector computers do?"
I can't talk for every department across the UK of course, but I worked full time in public sector in local government for 6 years, and have done a few contracts in other areas of government and I can say that without question that's absolutely the case. Part of the problem is as much that they're given more money to dick around with computers in the first place than priva
Re: (Score:2)
Number I pulled out of my ass way too high! (Score:5, Funny)
Stephen Kelly COO Biography (Score:2)
Some perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
I had to comment to say that I work in the UK public sector and this is so far from the truth it's amazing. It's complete crap. I'm sure someone wanting to make a point about waste could find a department somewhere in the country which made some bad decisions and got locked into an expensive contract but the general picture is that public service IT teams are under huge pressure to reduce costs. I suspect this £6000 figure is about ten times what we spend over the thousand-odd desktops in our offices.
But let's not forget that in the UK at the moment, we have both a government with an interest in painting public sector organisations as slow, lazy and wasteful in order to lay the foundations of their plans to privatise it (i.e. sell it to their old etonian school chums). We also have a press which is more than happy to press home the same idea. Why let actual facts get in the way of that?
Re: (Score:2)
2 years ago when I was contracting in the NHS, they were paying about £800 for a new desktop (hardware + licenses) of which ~£400 was the licenses because the current government had decided that negotiating pricing with Microsoft et al nationally for the NHS was a bad idea when they could have each trust pay 3 times as much instead.
Factor in 12 support staff at ~£20k/year for 2,500, machines and that's maybe another £100 on top, so call it about grand for the first year once you fact
Re: (Score:2)
Also, what exactly does he think these 10 iPads are going to do? Magically maintain themselves while also writing a compatibility layer to allow all the shitty in-house windows-only (sometimes DOS-only) applications to run on them?
Of course not. They'd have Capita or EDS come on board as consultants for the deployment. The consultants would fill their pockets, and some politicians and high-up civil servants would ensure a job on leaving office. Employees, struggling with a severely impractical but sexy solution would switch to using post-it notes and pens, thus reducing government spending on treatments for RSI and similar computer-caused ailments. The savings made here would reduce the overall annual cost per device to £
Not quite.. but I've been there.. (Score:4, Interesting)
When I worked as a SysAdmin (on to an IT Manager) at a Healthcare system, I inherited a PC system spanning 16 counties, 300 machines all running various iterations of Windows on a mixture of new and incredibly aging machines. We spent so much time and wasted so much money on supporting some of these machines in the remote sites that I eventually got fed up and made a PXE booted custom mini-Linux distro (I dubbed it Spork Linux because it was so damned handy) that included basic web browsing, rdesktop (rdp client), citrix client, helpdesk access and a few misc tools and just setup a central Windows terminal server. This gave us better control over what people were accessing and where, removed licenses for apps that some people really didn't need.. (c'mon.. how many people really needed Microsoft Office suite? So.. we set OpenOffice and made them think some of them had MS Office.. LOL) and helped us "recycle/reuse" some old machines that now acted simply as dumb terminals but booted up in about 5-20 seconds since all that extra bloat wasn't there anymore. After all that license reclaiming and monitoring how much we spent on travel, repairs, etc.. we saved over 75,000$/year easily. It's definitely not that impressive but when you considering that's for a small org covering the geographic distance of a US state.. that's decent enough.. those numbers from the UK government don't surprise me all that much in comparison considering how many machines/people/locations they'd have to support. It's wasteful and awful, but unless someone changes it.. and for the better, they are going to hemorrhage money.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, on the contrary - someone making 1/10th the salary wouldn't be able to do the job, becaues there'd be nobody around smart enough to train them. Someone at that income level lacks the initiative and professionalism necessary. (Yes, even if they're in India doing it remotely, or they're only making half as much.)
Yes, a well oiled machine runs better for longer without being adjusted. But when something bad happens to that well maintained machine, it's usually a little bit more complex than just kicking it
Impressive! (Score:2)
Your incompetence and inefficiency astounds me! You are true disciples of the bureaucratic side.
Bullshit (Score:2)
What does this £6,000 cover? Network services and wages to support all these machines? £6,000/user/year for IT isn't that unreasonable for a very large organization that has to handle sensitive data, maintain strict access controls and comply with a lot of legal requirements on document storage. People would be upset if the government claimed to have lost important emails due to a HDD failure.
A 7 minute boot time doesn't equate to three days a year lost either, especially since few p
Re: (Score:2)
A 7 minute boot time doesn't equate to three days a year lost either, especially since few people [...] stand there staring at the screen waiting for it to boot.
Um, dude? What do you think a COO does?
TFA seems rather confused... (Score:5, Informative)
A few gems:
“I came into the office and I pressed my PC and it took me seven minutes to boot up,” he told attendees. “That’s government in the old world, that’s three days of the year I waste of my time booting up."
Urm, just gonna sit there and watch it boot, eh Steve? Go grab a coffee, make some calls...whatever.
"You wouldn't believe how much (it costs), I think the average cost of a desktop a year is about £6,000"
So he "thinks" a "desktop" costs that....I wonder what the definition of "desktop" is? The PC, the PC & support? The PC, support & s/w? etc...
The Fine Jounalist challenges the £6K figure.
"According to my estimations – verified by a CIO – this figure should be less than £1,000 per year taking into account the cost of the hardware, office suite, and support and server costs over a three-year period"
Seems more reasonable, but does not say it's a like-for-like comparison. Support costs for Govt. PC may include additional security, network and application maintenance, which for Govt crapware can be insanely costly.
Could only find one other article here, but really just the same information...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10097514/State-workers-spend-three-days-a-year-waiting-for-PCs-to-start.html [telegraph.co.uk]
Apples and oranges. (Score:2)
The original study seems to be using PCs as a quick way of counting the users that they support. Many computer intensive organizations spend GBP 6000 per person per year in - here's the catch - total IT costs. Government administration is probably typical here, and GBP 6000 is not at all unreasonable.
The author of this article quickly points out that she can buy 22 iPads for that price. That's great, but it doesn't pay her website, server, ERP system or the people to run it all. Her CIO friend who thinks a
Re: (Score:2)
Boot Time = Desktop or Laptop? (Score:2)
As laptops are much easier to "misplace", there are a couple of policies that virtually every government department (and big business, for that matter) requires are in place if the unit might get even the slightest sniff of sensitive information.
1 - Hard drive encryption must be in play before the OS boots.
2 - Laptops must be fully powered off when in transit to ensure the hard drive encryption is fully engaged and no residual data is available in RAM.
When I worked for the NHS, the encryption software alone
Sheer incompetence (Score:2)
They could start by making some changes that cost nothing and would reduce their boot times. Most critical of all is the need to use an enterprise management tool (Altiris etc.) to run the fleet and automate maintenance. This alone combined with a competent staff and policies that allow them to use best practices should drop maintenance costs by 75% within a year.
For an immediate free impact you can start by stopping the scheduling everything to run overnight! This doesn't work when combined with shutting
Re: (Score:2)
The boot times are mostly due to the very high security environment, pre-boot hard drive encryption and extra security software ...
Re: (Score:2)
When I first started deploying full disk encryption in the late 90's it was a significant burden on the computer. It could easily take over a day to encrypt the drive and performance was castrated on any computer. That was an eternity in technology though and today you can typically run full disk encryption with about a 2% load.
I've worked with environments where anything that could be was encrypted, from the disk to routine traffic (email etc). With today's computers you should never have more than a 5% im
Re: (Score:2)
Wake on LAN for maintenance is something that sounds great in practice. Wake your computers up at 2 AM, perform all of your maintenance and put them back to sleep. Unfortunately it doesn't work very well in production and reliability is a huge issue. If you can get it to work you can use it to reduce some load by scheduling maintenance overnight. However in practice it tends to fail and your back to your problem with everything happening first thing in the morning.
Daytime maintenance windows avoid these iss
I've worked for several London councils.... (Score:2)
...and I can tell you, this is not surprising at all.
All the desktops are the lowest CPU version possible - usually with not enough memory either. Because you can't put a value on waiting for bootup/ apps/ etc., but you can show how much money you've saved by going for a Celeron instead of an i3/ i5, you can guess which one happens.
Then there's citrix, and other money-saving wheezes that ultimately do nothing to lower the TCO, rather just shift the expense to the server-end instead of the desktop. And that
Railway Level Crossings (Score:2)
WTF? (Score:2)
The wonder of windows (Score:2)
I can't tell you how many times I've grabbed my android tablet to get to the web while waiting for my PC to recover from either losing it's mind or getting an update.
Re: (Score:2)
7 minutes * 240 days is 1680 minutes, divide by 60 is 28 hours, divide by 3 is 9 hours 20 minutes. So yeah, if the PC really takes 7 minutes to boot, then 3 days/year is kinda right. This doesn't take into account the fact that it might not be typical, and most people do something else rather than stare at a booting PC.
Re: (Score:2)
"and most people do something else rather than stare at a booting PC."
We're talking about UK government office staff here, no they don't. They just sit drooling whilst mindlessly waiting for either Facebook or Solitaire to show up on their screen.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
6 minutes boot time isn't insane on a heavily automated setup. Then again, who needs to reboot their PC every day on a well maintained setup? At best you'd simply let it sleep or hibernate to save some power and perhaps shut it down only in the weekends.
Also; 6 minutes is easily covered by turning on your computer first, then walking back to put up your coat, get a cup of coffee, etc...
Re: (Score:2)
Combined with a "how many times do you want to reboot today" OS that needs a kick after minor patches and you've either got extra IT people rebooting things at night or management that will start to lose patience and look for heads to kick.
Re: (Score:2)
There are countless places i've been to where 6 minutes would be considered a good bootup time, some take a lot more than that, especially if you count the time required to log in and not just the time to display the login prompt.
Sleep and/or hibernate is often not reliable, and on corporate images is often disabled, and even then it can take a ridiculous amount of time to wake up.
Many companies have a policy of shutting everything down at night "to save power"... And i know several places that don't but if
Re: (Score:2)
In this age of gigabit networks, fast network storage and che
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I used to work for a large financial institution which used roaming profiles and indeed had quite a long boot time.
The solution was pretty easy and exactly as I already stated and very little time was lost.
How many people actually sit behind their computers waiting for them to boot up?
I know other groups who had agreements that the first person there just switched on all computers or atleast the ones in their immediate reach.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't buy it. Yes, a laptop with full disk encryption takes a bit of time to boot (mine, a Dell Latitude D630, has just taken 3 minutes including the initial decryption dialogue) but a desktop system will boot faster. If 7 minute boot times where I work were common, our help desk would be inundated with angry calls every morning and the IT director besieged by demands for the service to be fixed.
I'm not sure about that £6000 figure - which was the cost, by the way, not just maintenance - but numbers
Re: (Score:2)
By taking into account the bad DNS configuration that drastically increases the login time on Windows PCs and that is rife throughout the networks supported by many incompetent public sector IT departments I would guess.
Re: (Score:2)
Last year his XP laptop needed >15 mins. to boot up and log in.
I checked and found the disk heavily fragmented and it was initially impossible to fix as there was less than a few % of free space.
Cleaning out a bunch of stuff and a night with a good (non MS) defragger made it a better PC at around 5 mins. boot and log in.
We are the Data Acquisition Dept, IT is supposedly our business so I'm not at all surprised by problems
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't it possible to use, I don't know, Suspend to Disk aka. Hibernation feature? That would save awful lot of time.
Possible replies (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"The program was suspended in March 2010 and cancelled in June 2011. It was later found to have cost more than $100 million."