Looking for a good business computer manufacturer...

[Dave Sydenham]

As an IT Manager I have become increasing frustrated with the manufacturer of our PC and Printer Equipment (we use of of the leading brands exclusively - I will not name them but you can probably work it out )

They have recently changed the way the Operating System loads so that it is like their own configuration which is not very customisable in the least. In fact it is not possible to partition the hard drive which we require as part of our standard build. Needless to say they were not very helpful when I called to seek a resolution!

Why do they also insist on Pre-loading 3 month trials of Norton Anti-Virus and various other spurious software which we then need to uninstall. It has become more like a home use machine than a business machine. Unfortunately we are not large enough to justify building an image for all machines as we tend to buy only a few at a time. All I want is a good base machine with a standard copy of Windows XP - just seems this is too much to ask!

We have Care Packs with a 4 hour 24/7 response for our Servers (which they don't always have a record of as we discovered) however as they do not keep stocks of parts and these often need to be ordered from abroad the 4 hours often turns into 4 days.

The call centres are based in India and service is generally appalling.

For these reasons I have decided to look for another manufacturer. Just wondered what experiences anyone else has of any manufacturers and their service or lack thereof?

Cheers!

Dave

[RonProwse]

Dave to be honest it seems that you have reached a point where it is going to be worth getting a member of staff trained up to create your own build, basically you must already have the licences and all the machines are very similar in speciation, so why not take the machine build it with a basic image.
This image should consist of the O/S and all the basic packages (word, Outlook etc), once this is done ghost the image to a networked server using Symantec Ghost, this means that you can deploy that image to ANY similar PC very quickly. The last place I worked adopted this and it saved a lot of time when the machines went wrong, also it allows you to Tweak the setting on the image if you need to lock down the PC to prevent access to the RUN command and the registry.

If you want to know more PM me.


Ron

[Dave Sydenham]

Hi Ron,

Yeah I have considered creating a standard image in the past. Our machines are all heavily locked down with Group Policy, for example no one has access to anything other than network drives, no C: drive, no CD drive, etc, hence the reason to need to create a partition for laptops for times when they are away from the network.

The only reason I haven't persued this up until now really is that there is only me here doing all the IT and with some of the bigger projects I have been working on over the last couple of years there simply hasn't been the time. It was only with our most recent purchases that we ran into the partition problem and had to use Partition Magic to acheive the desired results.

We use Citrix here for our remote users and one thought is just to do away with buying PC's altogether and just phase in Thin Client for all the local users too. I already use this to deploy non-standard applications to local users so only one more step to rollout to all.

I would be interested in any info you have on creating an image so PM on its way.

Thanks!

Dave