Home Forums Discussions General Discussion What to do w/ OLD desktop computers?

Friends and A.C. users: I have a dilemma. I will need to replace 4 of my office computers. They are becoming outdated, probably by the end of year I'll get rid of them. They will be 3.5 yrs old in December. They are DELL 80GB hard drive, 2GB RAM, no frills.

What do AC users think I should do with the old computers?

Why replace them at all? As long as they work so what if they are old? (I tell myself the same thing every day as I trudge into the office). Specifially what are they not able to do that you need them to do?

Leslie

Hi Adam:

What I do usually is go to eBay and purchase a top-of-the-line "barebone computer" for about $300 which upgrades my motherboard, ram memory, and gets me a new case. I use the HD as a backup drive and buy a new HD too. I reuse the CD/DVD drive. Not a bad deal.

Sometimes the Dells/Gateways offer good new computers for about $500. You can donate your computer to Goodwill in that case.

But 3 years is not that old...

Cheers,
Al

Actually one of the computers in my office is a pentium II 500mhz running windows 2000 and it works well. If it ain't broke don't spend money to replace it.

Impressive, Wendell.

Maybe that could be another challenge: who is running AC on the oldest and most decrepit old PC?

I normally donate it to charity with all data scrubbed well. Last thing I need it someone gets the computer with patient data.

Sometimes I have repurposed the machine to run some old DOS lab program. But 3 years is not old. they will run fine

Yeah, our tower is almost five years old now, built in May of '03 I think. Now I built it big and bad back then and paid the price, but only now is it getting a bit long in the tooth. But I sure am getting my money's worth out of the darn thing. XP Pro and a P4 Hyper-threaded really seems to be holding it's own.

So I just went to Crucial to scan her and get a recommendation on a RAM increase. I gonna bump our 512 to 2.5 via a pair of matched sticks on 1 gig a piece and see what that will do instead. If this tower wasn't both a working work station and a P2P "server" even that wouldn't really be needed. It's just when the poor thing has 2-4 apps open and the rest of the office is trying to access AC on it, the other client's access can sometime slow down a bit too much. But half the time that is really more the network (wireless) than the tower.

Then I'll either add a good NAS for the data and it's sharing or I'm still toying with the idea of the new "Home Server" thingy as a good alternative.

What we really need is one extra laptop, client like machine so we can all move around the office freely and stay productive. That will probably be my next purchase after the RAM. Then later the NAS, server addition.

Anyway, just like my '98 ZJ Grand Cherokee, that old 5.2 magnum is sure strong enough for me on a daily basis. I'm actually gonna get another cleaner one from a nice private seller soon. Purchase wisely and take good care of what you've got and you can probably keep it and get great use out of it for a very long time. That's my two cents for what it is worth....

Thanks for all the replies, folks. Maybe I'll keep them awhile longer.

They do work, but since I'm making the staff use EMR for everything it would be nice if I splurged and bought them wide screen monitors.

I honestly don't know what I'd do w/ out mine, since I usually open several windows at once and work across multiple applications simultaneously.

I see them minimizing windows to see other windows and I cringe at how less productive they are being.

We bought AC to replace a schedule and billing program that was DOS based. (You remember DOS don't you?) Didn't try to get AC to run on the Windows '98 machines, but kept them for a few months as a station to look up old chart numbers on. Currently have 2 very old servors, (to be replaced this month) and 14 PC's, 4 laptops and 3 "thin clients" (what I call a dumb terminal). Our network is all wrong, but is gradually getting into shape for the current job. Everything is on XP-pro, except one laptop that we tried on Vista, (hey, I saved $100.00) and then we paid a bunch more to have XP-Pro installed on it. AC works on Vista OK, but Vista doesn't work so good on Vista!

DocM,
The liklihood of Vista working properly might depend upon what version was installed. Only Vista Business Ed. and Ultimate Ed. work properly w/ networks. The Home and Home Premium Ed.'s that come standard on today's new P.C.'s are just not compatible w/ Server O.S.'s (Server 2000, Server 2003, Small Business Server 2003). They are also not well compatible with the most basic peer to peer networks. Hence a lot of the problems that people keep voicing.
I have Vista Business on all of our clients and SBS 2003 on my server. I've had no substantial issues, except a couple of sound cards and a video card that I had to buy new. No software issues however.
Vista Business is not for everyone though. I never had XP Pro therefore I never dot used to its features. So I converted from XP Home user to Vista Business without too much trouble.

Ah!, I wasn't aware of the difference.

Changing the subject backwards, for a while win2K would crash on printing, this seems to have settled down and AC is again stable on win 2k.
I started on AC in 11/02. Initially I had several 400 to 450 used computers in the rooms and front desk. I still use 2 of them, one for faxes, the other, as I said, is in the lab. Usually my MA puts the vitals in from there.
Win2K is faster than XP is faster than Vista (is there a trend going here?)
I have run AC on XP on a 450 (hows that for acronyms,) but it gets kinda slow, on win2K is runs fine.
If it ain't fixable I will keep using it until I find something else cheap and functional. Most of my other computers are in the 2K range, but AC does not require a lot, even though I think the recommendations are something like 1.5K machine.

if only AC ran on MYSQL and had a linux client, things would be so cheap and would run so fast.

Bert,
As someone with eyes over 40, be careful about those huge screens. The hospital had them and I found them to be very uncomfortable to use. I either had to sit an arm's length away or bob my head like someone watching a rodeo in order to get the bifocals to adjust to the different foci caused by the big screen. In fact, because of this, I chose a smaller screen for my personal desk computer when I replaced it several years ago. My employees are all over 40 also so they get along just fine with the smaller monitors.

Except I guess you would have to pay someone to develop and maintain the Linux version, right?

I guess it would need the same maintain it as would be with MS windows. What I hate is the server components of Microsoft are so expensive that people just windows XP as servers.