Stay out of the Hardware Business

Although it may seem unreasonable, I recommend you stay out the hardware business as much as possible. What does this mean?

• Buy new equipment from reliable vendors instead of building computers from pieces
• Buy on-site service contracts when purchasing.
• Avoid accepting donated equipment which requires retrofitting to meet your current hardware standard.

The fact is as soon as you or your staff start unscrewing the case of a computer, you are loosing money big-time. The repair will cost at least a quarter of what a new machine will cost. So you do this four times, you could have bought a replacement machine. Not only that, if you manage to fix the old machine, you still have…an old machine.


With new computers going for $1200 or so at this writing, it doesn’t make sense to try to build computers from scratch. Moreover, upgrades of existing machines should be considered only for those machines that were bought in the past 12-18 months at the most, and then only for a specific requirement. The reason? Even after upgrading an old machine you still have an old machine. As the technology improves, you will cling to the older machines longer, in an attempt to pyschologically justify both the initial investment and the cost of the upgrades. Again... you are not in the hardware business. so upgrades should be considered only rarely.

The Onsite Service Contract
Dell computers can be bought with a three-year on-site hardware service contract for about a hundred dollars over the price of the machine. The irony is, you won’t need to use this very often. Dell isn’t stupid, they know that the cost of the contract will be eaten up with a single service call for that machine. But when you need it, you call the technical support number with the machine’s service tag. They walk you through some diagnostics over the phone, and if they determine that there is a hardware problem, a guy in a cape appears the next day and fixes it. This keeps you out of the hardware business.

Sources for Hardware

Most likely, you may have the opportunity to obtain hardware from several different sources:
• Equipment purchased outright
• Equipment received as a donation
• Equipment received as part of a grant for a specific program


Vendor Recommendations
For workstations and servers: Dell for both. Compaq, HP or IBM as alternatives for servers. But again, if you end up getting XYZ workstations, why not get XYZ servers too and simplify your vendor relationships.

Operating System: Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP Professional. These allow much more control over the security aspects of the workstation than the “home” versions, like Windows 98 and ME.

Office Suite: Microsoft Office – Word, Excel

eMail: OutLook Express (not OutLook that comes with the Microsoft Office Suite)

Advantages of Uniform Hardware and Software

The more you can standardize the more you can save of individual items. Some other benfits standardizing:

• Users can learn from each other. If one user learns a procedure they can teach it to another. You begin to build an “institutional memory” among the users that transcends the individuals.
• Support is less involved because you spend less time negotiating between incompatible systems.
• You may be able to save by purchasing equipment and supplies in larger quantities than you would otherwise. You can buy software with a site license, often at dramatic savings.
• You can manage and secure the workstations centrally.
• You can substitute an identical or similar computer for one that malfunctions so that the user’s downtime is minimized.
• If everyone is using more or less the same equipment you avoid one-up-manship or primadonnas who insist on this or that configuration.


I’ll admit my prejudices are coming through here. But, pick a platform and stick to it. The benefits of standardization will outweigh any spurious gains and good-feeling that your staff have as they cling to their old familiar machine. Eventually, even the die-hards will get bored with the whole computer thing and realize that they have a real job to do. And if they don’t, then you’ve got a personnel problem, not just a computer problem.

Managing Hardware: The Principal of Uniformity

Is this your agency? You have Apple Macintoshes in one office, and in another, a mix of Windows PCs running Windows 95, 98, ME or NT4. Everything is connected via a Novell Network. using Novell’s propriatory network protocol ,You access the internet using a second protocol. You all print to a variety of laser, dot-matrix and inkjet printers. Many printers were purchased one at a time over the years and several sit on the desks of petulant managers who insist that they must have their own personal printer. Of course, since these were bought ad-hoc, you felt you couldn’t justify more than a home-grade inkjet printer, so you have a few of the older ink-jets which cost 50 cents per printed sheet, in cartridges and regularly jam and smear. Several folks have spouses who have purchased their own laptop computers (from multiple mannufacturers) and they are now coming to you asking whether they can use these at home to access the office network.

Consider: Let’s say you’ve got the aforementioned Macs in 2 versions, and computers with three different versions of Windows, and maybe 4 different printers. Let’s say these all have to talk to each other. That’s at least 2x3x4 – 24 combinations of hardware and software which need to talk to each other. At this point, I hear you saying “it really isn’t that bad”..but think about it:

• The Apples need software drivers for each printer.

• The Windows machines need software drivers for each printer.

• Wordprocessing, eMail and spreadsheet and database programs need to be able to read attachments created on the other machines.

• eMail setups will be different between Apples and Windows and among the Windows versions

• Virus protection will be different between the different platforms and versions

• There will be little opportunity to centrally manage anything on the workstations.

• You can’t easily replace one person’s machine if their's goes bad because you have nothing else in the office that matches.

The above example is a real one. A more recent example is an office with 15 users. They have Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows XP workstations and a Windows NT file server for the network. WordPerfect versions 6.0 and 10. A proprietary application uses Microsoft Word 2000 and Excel for writing reports. Each machine has at least two word processors and sometimes three. The office has two HP LaserJet2P printers, a LaserJet 4P, a couple of 6P printers and a LaserJet Series II circa 1986. (Guess which printer is the most reliable?)

Ten years ago technology was expensive enough that it may have made sense to build things up incrementally. However, over the longer term the cost of supporting multiple versions of everything will eat you alive. It is a luxury you really can't afford.

Pick a platform that you can live with. Windows or Mac. Reduce your operating systems by half. (if you have five different versions of Windows, work out a scenario that only supports two, to start). Replace the earlier versions with the later versions. Repeat every six months until you have a single O/S, (which, frankly, as of 1st quarter of 2003 I hope is Windows XP Professional, or Mac OSX). If you have multiple printers, do the same.

If you can follow this halve-every-six-months regime, after two years or so, even the most diverse office will be narrowing down the multiples. You can reverse the incremental build-up in the other direction. Of course, if you have a solid technology plan which calls for wholesale replacement of large numbers of machines at once, so much the better.