Re: Information gathering exercise

Thanks for that Jared, but I doubt that my CEO is all that easy to shame on
such matters but that won't stop me trying.

In any event, when the job market improves, I can always take my skills
elsewhere; somewhere else that values my time and productivity more highly.

On 19 February 2010 13:10, Jared Richardson <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> Show The Powers That Be what the baseline NewEgg consumer desktops are.
> Perhaps you can shame them into an upgrade?
>
>
> http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=10&name=Desktop-PCs
>
> At about 1,000USD, you can do very well.
>
> Jared
>
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 4:14 PM, Gordon Milne <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Hi!
>>
>> I am attempting to get my team (all three of us) hardware upgrades for
>> our development activities. And I need your help.
>>
>> We are currently running on 2.4GHz Pentium 4 desktops that are maxed
>> out with 2GB RAM and around 100GB disk (usually made up of a 30GB
>> system drive and a 70GB data drive). The original systems were 512MB
>> RAM and a 30GB disk drive. Each desktop has a 22inch and 19inch
>> monitor attached to it. Our work centres around Java technologies with
>> some Linux for a complex scientific instrument. Our principle IDE is
>> IDEA. One of the guys won't use IDEA past version 6 due to lack of
>> responsiveness. I use release 8 and put up with the sluggishness on my
>> ancient hardware. But, I have had enough of this self abuse and
>> bruising of my brain.
>>
>> How can you help me?
>>
>> Well it looks as if it is going to be very hard for me to get any
>> monies for upgrades the way the budget, under the CEO-elect, is
>> shaping up. Apparently, he had someone visit our offices recently and
>> that person pronounced our systems as old, but good enough. I never
>> met this person. No one on my team met this person. So I have no idea
>> how he gauged our systems suitability for purpose.
>>
>> Sheesh!
>>
>> Anyway, back to that helping thing.
>>
>> I'd like to know what kind of hardware you are developing on. I am
>> interested in the processor , the RAM and the disk size. If you can
>> also give me some idea of the principle development task that might be
>> useful too. I am less interested in the OS you are using. I intend
>> using this information as data to push my argument for desktop
>> upgrades.
>>
>> I will post a summary of responses in around a month's time in case
>> the information is useful to others.
>>
>> Finally, I would be grateful if you can tell me your locality. I am
>> based in Christchurch, New Zealand and I get the feeling that my
>> CEO-elect might be more responsive to my needs if I can show that
>> other, local companies, are.
>>
>> I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for your assistance.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Gordon J Milne
>>
>> p.s. FWIW, my gut feel, given the age of our machines, and how long it
>> takes for us to replace hardware, was that we should upgrade to quad
>> core desktops with 4GB RAM that can be grown to 16GB. As for disk, I
>> was aiming to start with 500GB drives. I am using a very naive metric
>> for this upgrade but our current CPUs have a passmark
>> (http://www.cpubenchmark.net) of 322 and I'd like to see us working
>> with systems having a passmark of 4000 or more.
>>
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