Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
Putting a $50 SSD in is the most effective way you can bring life back to old systems. 4GB of ram and an SSD will make almost any 10 year old machine fast enough for basic web browsing and usage. I've done many of them.
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Excellent call Fuzz. I was at a college that was running into a budget crunch and we had to make some hard decisions on spend. The desktop fleet had grown beyond control and was getting long in the tooth, but the network infrastructure was also 12-15 years old and needed a severe makeover. While I tend to focus on user experience as the main driver behind divisions I run, I couldn't ignore the larger need. Enter the SSD and RAM solution. Maxing out the RAM and adding small SSDs in place of the spindle drives made all the performance difference in the world. It appeared like 60% of our fleet was replaced, because of the performance upgrade, but it was only a minor expenditure ($180K vs $2.4M) that allowed us to improve both the user experience and the core network infrastructure. We got an extra 2-3 years service out of those machines, allowing us to spend on the more important underlying infrastructure, get it upgraded and on a proper replacement cycle. "Inside the box" thinking really helped us out of a pickle.