Currently my place of work (A Garden Centre) has 9 PC's linked over a network in a Workgroup and 4 Tills (Also PC's) all running XP Pro. These are all old PC's and the workgroup came about after the Server a Dell PowerEdge 2600 started erratically restarting itself. Its been sitting in the corner for about 6 years with Windows 2000 Sever Pro on it. Nobody here has a clue when it comes to computers, the person who looked after it all and set it up left 2 years ago. Since then I have had the role of fixing things when they go wrong. But the Hardware of teh PC's (mostly hard drives and CD-roms) is failing left right and centre. If your still reading, well done! Question is. What would those in teh know recomend. Should I try and get the server back up and running? Or is it old and inferioir. So should I convince them to buy a new one and go back to having a server. Or is that a waste, is just replacing teh failing PC's the smartest path? Being a small independent the company doesn't have alot to spend, so cheapest option, that will last, is best!
Whats causing the excessive failures? Are the PCs being turned off overnight or something (and thus forming condensation on the cold metal), that might cause some premature failures in an unheated env. Its cool to run a pc in cold climate, just dont turn them off. Is it just a bad batch of PCs? A place i worked bought a bunch of pcs from a well known vendor, and approx 7 months after purchase, one by one the motherboards started going -- visible swelling to the same capacitors every time. That was like ~40 pcs bought in the one batch, 3 or 4 going each day for a week until we finally got dell to replace the mobos premptively on the rest. As for the server question, just go with what's simplest to maintain. Are you getting lots of "i need my password reset" questions? A server / Active Directory domain would mean you could do this a lot faster and not need to go visit each user's pc. Weigh up the benefits of moving to a server archicecture, but i expect them to be negligable for such a small deployment. Yes "experts" will scoff at the idea of running what is essentially a peer to peer network for a small business. Simple way to stave off those arguments: write me a list of the benefits of your server solution Mr Consultant, now write me up the price tag vs. what it's going to give me savings wise over the next 3 years.
All the PC's are turned off overnight, reason being power saving. Hadn't considered what you mentioned, so it could be a result of that but also cheap hardware plays its part in my opinion. The PC's were all hand built from off the shelf parts and the hard drives and CD-Roms are particularly cheap! We don't get alot of requests that would be made easier by having a server if i'm honest. What is a problem is how unbilevably slow the desktops are becomming. It's taken a good 15 mintues to get this one booted and into IE, and its not the worst. I would do a clean install but the CD-Rom crashes the computer in Win and on startup. Which leaves installing over a network which I have no idea how to do! My thinking was that If I fixed teh server, I could run everything from that freeing up resourses on the desktops.
I have multiple computers here at home and i just use a NAS for a central file store. They all run alone and just grab files from the one point. What spec are these computers? Do they need a cleaning out? If they've been there for a few years they may be full of dust / crap. Replace the CD Drives, a brand new IDE DVD/RW drive is around £15, or a usb cd drive around £30-40?
Intel P4 2.8 256Mb Maxtor 40GB Samsung DVD Drive Can't find out what the motherboard is but I rember it being an Asus. EDIT P5S 800 VM Virus's. Should be all clear. Have a Trend Micro solution which seems to hug enough resources! Maybe keeping it simple and just upgrading the drives is the best bet. However that wont help the speed of these machines. More memory would most likely sort that but as these are old I htink i've found it to be expensive. EDIT £18.39 for 512MB from Crucial... hmmm, seems like it is a possibility.
erm, that 256mb of RAM seems to be a problem. Pentium 4's i suspect will be DDR, maybe taking 1GB max. 40GB's is fine for work related, internet browsing and upgrade IDE drives won't give a performance boost. DVD drive should be fine? How often are they used.
Hardly ever used at all. Whats happening is as soon as a CD is inserted, the computer frezzes, this has happened on 3 computers. On one particular PC it couldn't even boot into windows so I fixed that but swapping it for another one. have tried updating the drivers but that hasn't worked.
Personally I'd got for a new SBS server then a roling replacement program on the PC's. I'd recommend getting someone in to do this so you don't have to worry about it. I'm not touting for business here but my company is local to you and could do the quoting bit for you to save you the hassle,
