Re: Information gathering exercise

unless cash is very tight, it sounds shortsighted to me
- a good CEO should know that a happy engineer is a productive engineer, and the inverse is also true
- the time you spend dealing with slow systems, complaining, and researching like you're doing, is time you aren't working on business critical problems
- perhaps work with him to draw up a purchasing plan, so he buys a new system every couple months rather than all at once, and should be budgeting full replacement every couple of years
- usually, retired engineering desktops can be given to other company staff is an upgrade for them

 

On Feb 18, 2010, at 7:30 PM, Gordon Milne wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>