Intel says new PCs will cost you nothing Intel says that upgrading your company's four-year-old PCs today will pay for itself in 10 to 17 months. But you might say that the world's largest microprocessor manufacturer has a vested interest in such an upgrade. Those figures come from an Intel-commissioned study conducted by R&D services provider Wipro and revealed …
"It's great to see my employer's sponsored surveys coming out now that show that one of the best ways to make a PC environment more secure is to buy new PCs."
Meantime, In the real world, surveys show that *nix computers are more secure. No matter how old they are.
The best way to keep a PC secure is to unplug the RJ45 round the back, remove the floppy/CD drive, and disable USB in BIOS. That'll stop the fsckers!
Should be a good opportunity to splash out on some nice cheap 3 yr old PC's for conversion to Umbongo. Bring it on!
So upgrading from, say, a 1GHz Athlon 64 to some sort of ultra powerful games rig would give the average Windows-and-MSOffice user what sort of a benefit?
I mean okay, so you've got bragging rights over your mates in the pub that you can play Bioshock at lunchtime. But aside from that, where's the benefit unless you're doing 3D or video editing work? Does Word loading 3/4 of a second faster really save that much time?
They don't give a figure, but if you say £500 per computer for easy maths then that means you're getting a 1 - 2% increase in productivity by speeding their computer up by not a huge amount in practical terms.
Surely the real benefits can be derived from upgrading the servers and having a sensible, structured file location and naming system so you don't spend hours every day looking for documents or waiting for drawings to load up. Or adding a second monitor to make sure you've got enough space for the majority of tasks?
Just Knowing some sucker Spent fortune for employees' desktop, 7 being Latest, Is Boost To Morale.
Knowing some techie in basement is turning Purple Just to revitialize THIS showplace is great. However, VERY few Businesses use Microsoft products, its just too open to backdoor snooping. Maybe they ALL are.
Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART von DRASHEK M.D.
What's your point?
That second hand PCs will still be cheaper than second hand Macs in 2012?
That PCs will be proportionately cheaper in 2012 because there will still be so many more around and working?
That Macs will be more of a collector's item in 2012?
That you're a clairvoyant?
Welcome, PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART von DRASHEK M.D., ..... All Inquirers on El Reg are another Nail in the Coffins of Arrogant Indifference and Ignorant Compliance, which are Destined for the Pyres that Flame Underground Fires of Insatiable Passion.
United We Stand, Divided They Fall, only Takes a Few Good Men and True in Viceless Service of Sinful Ladies for AI Perfect, Mutually Beneficial Satisfaction Guaranteed. Or is urDriver an Artificial Construct Easily Manipulated and Subverted to Provide Distraction and Perversion.
There's a Lot going on in CyberSpace, for Absolute Control of ITs Power, El Reg. Why do you dance around IT rather than hire a Room for the Night?
...I'm wondering about the life expectancy of hard drives, and for how long I shall be able to easily get a PATA drive.
I'm the sort of guy who can install a SATA card, but paying corporate costs for the time of a technician (it's not just payroll) make older hardware potentially a gamble.
Similarly, I don't need remote management, but it's a new feature that Intel are selling, and which can pay off. LCD monitors are becoming commonplace. Will these new things save me enough money?
What I wonder is why software expands to fill the processing power available. It's interesting that even after the Vista resource-hog, Intel are selling on something other than raw power.
Behind the figures: A 1Ghz Powerbook is still usable with Mac OS 10.5. My similarly aged 1Ghz Celeron desktop is a dog under XP and Vista? Don't bother - that's why Mac's hold their value. So the moral of the article - your machines will become obsolete sooner and the planet with die more quickly if you run Windows.
@AC - a 1Ghz athlon64 to run Office? Not if you've also got corporate AV on there!
A crappy celeron 1ghz will run XP and decent AV software and all office quites needed for most office work. Put 2gb of RAM in there and you are laughing.
Then lock down the machine so people cant install stuff. have a decent corp firewall and an email gateway av solution and you are not only laughing but a happy IT bod.
Why should anew £500-800 PC running Fistya bloatware be any better ? its not.
wow... are you the slightly more intelligable sibling of amanfrommars?
Also, @codge- I took it as meaning it makes the PC industry more secure in that there's more PCs being sold so there's more work to do and more money to make. So rather than security in the sense of firewalls etc he was meaning it in terms of "job security".
Whether or not it's got Vpro, a new PC will eat less electricity than a Pentium 4. Assuming 40 watts less, that's something like £8 p.a. if it's on 8 hours/day during the working week, and £35 p.a. if it's left on 24x365 (like the striplights in most city office blocks). 40W may be conservative.
Of course, the lower-hanging fruit ought to be those striplights!
If you don't need a performance boost, a "thin" PC with an Atom CPU and a SSD will save a lot more than 40W. For things that aren't CPU intensive, it'll feel a lot faster than a PC with a 3-year-old conventional disk. (But it won't run Vista and SMEs can't buy XP. Kick, kick.)
@Gordon Ross
"cheaper alternative, in my experiance, has been to re-install Windoze every 6 months or so. It's surprising how just a Windoze re-install will improve the speed of a PC."
Yes. I have see this too. However, if you install GNU/LInux you can run for years with better performance and no slowdowns. Last night I installed Debian Lenny GNU/Linux on an old PC. It was loaded with undetectable malware which was clogging the uplink with something. Download volume = upload volume. Download speed changed from a few kilobytes per second to more than 100 kilobytes per second and the desktop was very snappy. The owner should be able to run for years on that 1.4gHz CPU.
A few months ago, I upgraded the motherboard and hard drives on my personal PC. I did not need to re-install, just copied all the files to the new storage systems. The OS was Debian Sarge GNU/Linux installed in 2004. To upgrade to Etch, all I needed to do was type apt-get update;apt-get dist-upgrade after switching to the new repository. Debian refreshes itself. No need to do much every 6 months except ask it to do so. Further, when you re-install that other OS, you need to re-install drivers and applications separately. With GNU/Linux, if all your stuff comes out of a repository, the package management software does it all.
If time is money, the time you save on re-installing and re-re-rebooting is worth far more than the cost of a new PC when you run GNU/Linux.
.
"According to Crooke, the bulk of the savings in the PCs without VPro - Intel's remote-management and maintenance technology - come from reduced support costs and out-of-warranty repair costs of aging PCs."
Ummmm bull! ... a PC breaks down, it's 6 years old, needs a new cpu .. trash it gwt a new pc. Cost of support ... NIL as it didnl;t need any support for he last 6 years. Out of warranty repair costs? why? it's OLD! it's cheaper to replace than get out of waranty repairs, not brain surgery to figure that one out!
"he also cited an interesting figure from the study: that four-year-old PCs have a 53 per cent higher "security incident rate" than do new PCs, and that a three year-old PC has a 30 per cent higher rate."
More bull!!! My 6 year old pc runs the EXACT SAME o/s as a brand new pc (be it vista or xp) and therefore is no less secure! In fact it's more secure as it doen't have usb ports on the front!
Where DO they get this crap from??!!!
My current machine is 5 years old. It's 100% of what I need; any more PC would go unused. it does everything I need to do on it immediately, a faster machine would gain me nothing.
Tell me again how I get payback from replacing it?
If we're talking about reduced power consumption, well, if my company was worried about that, they probably wouldn't build barely-insulated crackerbox buildings then put 1200 tons of A/C on them, or run a couple hundred kilowatts of lighting at night when there's nobody here.
There's definitely some major sample bias going on here- as others have said, there's no reason a 3 yr old machine should be less secure than a brand new machine- IF!!- they are running the same O/S and applications and patched to the same level! There's nothing inherently less secure about a slower machine- if its infected with a virus, then that virus will just run more slowly, the same as any other app thats running.
I would leave to see just how they chose the machines to be included in this study. Were the older boxes forgotten about wrt patching? Were they running Win98? Who knows- Intel weren't saying.
Big pinch of salt to be taken with this.
In defence of that guys statements I think people have missed the obvious.
It's just that is after 4 years more garbage has been loaded on the PC, more people will been granted admin permissions and so forth so naturally more get compromised. Anyone telling me "every" system in a large corporation has had admin rights removed is talking crap, some VP, manager, techie etc will load dubious non-standard software from time to time.
This Intel sales guy simply cited figures which are probably real enough but twisted the reason these incidents occur to suit his sales pitch.
Sales twats.
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