Laptops or PC's?

[yazzyfooty]

Sean
Sadly our tech guys are being utter knobs and very obstructive. The reason being is that I put up a damn good fight (all the way to top director of the comapny) for the patients to have internet access and these muppets with no clinical background resisted it and tried telling our clinical team what wa sbest for the patients. End result patients do have supervised internet access but at the cost of very poor tech support for our day to day work pc's. But I take on your point about buying well known ones.

[applepie]

yazzyfooty nice one, getting patients access to the web. well done, i have friends who work in health care as well and they regularly encounter similar problems. its ridiculous.

not a sales person or affliated to dell or whatever,

but they are honestly one of the best, this is also according to my IT admins (both of them). compared to the crappy companies that are on our list of approved contractors/suppliers.

for businesses I think they do special deals. they also have "comprehensive support" for an extra charge if your tech guys are muppets. Saying that my housemate had huge issues fixing hers (but this was personal PC). I had one before and due to 1-3 defective pixels on my 15" screen, they replaced it with a 17" LCD FOC. They didnt even have to replace the screen (according to the contract/specifications), I just complained.

finance deals etc all apply as well.

For general surf web, word processing, an intel celeron/AMD sempron will suffice. 512mb ram, bog standard graphics card will do. would be looking at something like 300-350GBP? possibly cheaper as pretty much anything will do general office work well nowawayds.

For high spec, I would hesitate to recommend th absolute state of the art system as quite simply one a very small minority of hardcore gamers/graphics developers own them due to their high cost! easily 900+

For better specs ones, I would just go with the manufacturers recommendations and aim for something like the mid-range or based on your budget. there are so many graphics cards with so many configurations/prices its complicated.

A Pentium D will do or core2duo, with mid range specs I suspect 500-600.

The prices of AMD X2 dual core processors are going up as supply runs out, I dont know if this impacts desktop packages but for system builders the price of some AMD X2 chips are stupid in comparison to the intel core2duo at pretty much the same price (in some cases significantly cheaper) for much more performance.

at least 512mb ram, you cant have too much ram..well above around 2GB it gets funny

[yazzyfooty]

Thank you all for your advice and passing on of technical knowledge. It has now given me a good starting point to price equipment up.

Appliepie, sadly one of the reasons why it is so hard to get internet access for patients is due to the Tilt report and the Fallon Inquiry of the goings on at a high secure hospital a few years ago. Whereby patients were allowed free access to some unsavoury websites when they should have been closely supervised. The policy and guidelines I have developed are very rigid and allows no flexibility which was the only way I could get it agreed.

[EdHornby]

I'd say desktops and one laptop for anyone who genuinely needs the mobility iI.e. bedbound but otherwise gonna use it)

If you are on a budget, look for reconditioned office PC's, try europc.co.uk - we have the IBM thinkpad laptops and thinkcentre desktops, I think they are really good, Dell's and HP are great too

[rossbale28]

Hi Yazzy,

We have, in the past used non-brand local firms, components and built our own and have now gone down the Dell route. Good quality, spec & price with 3 yrs support as standard - which reduces the costs of support immensly.

Desktops would seem to be better for what you are looking for - consider something like the Dell Optiplex GX series, business grade PC's, networkable for easy internet access if using broadband.

In terms of spec, I personally would start with Pentium D as the lowest processor spec, other processors would be cheaper, but this can't be upgraded very easily, you will find buying semprons/celerons will mean that you need to upgrade/replace more frequently.

From the sounds of it, graphics card is unimportant in terms of high spec - most of the graphics cards that Dell supply would be ok, the main benefit/cost ratio for hardware is found in Memory and Disk Space - these are the cheap & easy things to upgrade, so, if you compromise anywhere do it here, preferably with the hard disk if you're not loading lots of applications on it.

Wouldn't go below 512Mb for Memory, consider 1GB as a starting point (Dell have quite a few 512MB free promotions) if you want to ensure that the purchase will last (future proofing just doesn't exist).

Apart from Dell, look at Lenovo or HP, they tend to be more expensive than Dell due to manufacturing processes etc, but HP have notably excellent support, Lenovo are most noted for their Thinkpad X series notebooks - virtually indestructable and market leading security.

HTH.

Ross.