, The Associated Press 2004-10-31
The people who call Dell Inc.'s customer service line often have no idea why their computers are running so slow. The ones who call America Online Inc. can't necessarily explain why Internet connections keep dropping. And those who file error reports with Microsoft Corp. don't always know why their computers inexplicably crash.
Expand all |
Post comment
I did a Google search of the TCO of owning a PC ?Total Cost of Ownership of a PC? and it yielded the links to these sites... these were all taken from the first page of the search?s hit results!
1) ?Industry analysts estimate the total cost of ownership in a non-homogenous computing environment to be over $10,000 per desktop when shadow support (support by those outside the IT group) and loss of productivity are factored in to the equation.? www.saic.com
2) "In 1997, International Data Corp. surveyed 400 school officials and calculated that the TCO for a school with 75 computers was $2,251 per year per computer, while a comparably sized business would have a TCO of $4,517 per computer. The TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of certain network configurations in the business world today can run as high as $11,000 per year per computer."
www.electronic-school.com
3) ?In today?s distributed IT environment, understanding the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) can undoubtedly help us effectively evaluate alternatives for acquisition, deployment, maintainence and support of PC. Many studies of the TCO have already shown that indirect costs are always far more than the direct costs. At City University, we have been enjoying first-class, state-of-the-art network and central services. It is estimated that the TCO of a PC on campus will be over $20,000 per year. Therefore, any uncontrolled or un-coordinated purchase of new PCs or even simple requests of connecting redundant or seldomly-used PCs to network without paying special attention to the organisation, process, technology, and support issues will definitely drive the TCO out of control. With limited manpower and further budget cut looming ahead, we must try to reduce the TCO of PCs university-wide in order to ensure that they are affordable, serviceable, and always available for our good use. Hence, the key to successfully reduce the TCO of PCs is not merely to understand the concept but to have departments and end users to fully cooperate with us to realise it."
www.cityu.edu.hk
...........* CONCLUSION? * ..............
Yes it's unbelievable, but I can believe it, because I deal with such absurdities on a daily basis.
* I?m glad I always partition my drives with FDISK (or if later), PartitionMagic v8.x, and use hard drive imaging (Norton Ghost or PQ?s Drive Image).
* If anyone asks me to build them a small network, even if it is small -- say someone wanted a very small network. Hmmm.. even a 3 PC network might as well be diving into the realm of 500+ PCs when there are clueless end-users with no strict policies.
* I won?t even go there (even a few PC?s) unless it?s Citrix MetaFrame or at the very bare minimum MS-RDP thin-client terminals !!
[ reply ]
Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/articles/9837/28966#28966