I don't know that anyone really cares, but here's the specs for our new batch of Dell desktops that just arrived ... we already had 3 of these in production with good results. Pictured are 40 units all with Vista Business edition thus making GCC a true dual platform environment (XP and Vista ... tri platform if you count our unofficial support for macs). We do have downgrade rights to XP so if Vista becomes a support headache we can drop back to XP.
These are on a 3 year $1 buyout lease ... and we plan for them to have a useful service life of 4 years with no additional hardware upgrades. We've gotten a number of requests for dual monitors, so I got dual output cards ... but departments will have to pony up the $$ for the 2nd screen.
Once these are in place we should be rid of all legacy non-dell desktops and Dell models under GX270's ... hopefully we'll loose many GX270's along the way too.
Dell Optiplex 745 Minitower
Core 2 Duo 1.86GHz 1066FSB
2GB 667 DDR Ram
ATI Radeon X1300 256MB dual DVI/VGA
160GB SATA II Drive
13-in-1 Media Card Reader
Vista Business Edition
16X DVD+/-RW
PS2 Serial Port Adapter
3 year NBD warranty w/ Gold Support
Waiting until Dell's end of Q2 to order yields great price breaks :-)
You may recall my old "what if" post on this, but I still think we could build our own Intel "certified" boxes and save a good chunk of $$, but I just didn't have the time to investigate that fully ... perhaps next year.
What made you decide on Vista Business as opposed to Vista Enterprise?
Posted by: Michael Sainz | August 16, 2007 at 11:58 PM
Very nice.
If you need help with planning to build boxes, I used to run shops that would build and deploy 30 servers a day.
Let us know when you have to downgrade to XP because that day is fast approaching.
Posted by: Joe Louthan | August 17, 2007 at 12:37 AM
These are nice units, Jason... our clients are using them with good results-- all except for Vista! And it's worth it to not have to support hardware... which will save you time and money in the short and long run.
Posted by: Nick Nicholaou | August 17, 2007 at 12:46 AM
Nick - but if all/most the hardware is part of the motherboard there's little hardware to support. Keep spares around and swap as needed.
See my prior thread on this: http://jpowell.blogs.com/jason_powell_church_it/2006/12/what_if_things_.html
Posted by: Jason Powell | August 17, 2007 at 12:57 AM
We ordered about 50 of these last month and have been very happy with them. Exact same specs as you have posted, except we got XP on all of them. No problems so far!
Posted by: Joshua Gregory | August 19, 2007 at 04:30 PM
Nice. If you need help \\imaging\setting up\installing these (on a Tuesday) - holla
Posted by: Brad | August 21, 2007 at 04:30 PM