🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <fbaglew.330@cs-acad-lan.Lakeheadu.Ca> fbaglew@cs-acad-lan.Lakeheadu.Ca (Richard Glew) writes:
>I am in the process of developing an employee computer purchase plan at 
>Lakehead University.  I am interested in information/advice from anyone who 
>has set up a plan at another institution.  Thanks in advance.
>
Having done  this once before for a small college, I have several
suggestions.  First off, buy real clones, i.e., build them yourself out
of name brand components.  Second, have a custom logo made to put on
cases, monitors, and keyboards.  This will give your product name
recognition.  Thirdly, spare up all the really important parts, such as
drives, cards, monitors, keyboards, power supplies, and motherboards.
Finally, only have two PC models, cheap and great.  For the cheap model,
a 4 meg ram vga SX 386 25 or so would be right and should cost about
$1,100 to $1,200 in a reasonable quantity.  The great should be a 486
with superVGA, local bus video, 8 megs of RAM, and a 200 meg drive.  It
should cost about $1,900 or so in quantity.  In terms of printers, my
advice is to stick with a cheap Epson, like the LQ 570, which has
scalable fonts and 24 pins and prints beautifully, or to go to Laser
printers, such as the HP 3P.  For an intermediate solution, pick an HP
Deskjet 500 B&W.

Thus, you deliver two systems, cheap and great, and three printers.  All
of these can be had at the right prices.  Make sure that you private
label your pcs and spare up.  The only thing left to consider is who
will do the maintenance.  You give 1 year P&L and then charge a fee for
maintenance, something like $30 per hour for labor plus parts costs, and
then that's it.  

Curiously, if you purchase lots of such gear for university use, the
savings can just about pay for a full time technician.  At WIU, we did
exactly that, and quickly got away from Zenith and IBM to real clones,
saving at least 25% per machine in the process.

=====================================================================
Thomas J. Scott  (aka Dr. J.)			Phone: 309-298-1452
Western Illinois University			mftjs@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu