Dear All,
I once knew someone who did tech support for universities who said that when he bought equipment for the student computing labs, he insisted on them being laptops (which always then get bolted to the table, mind you, so portability was never a goal). I don't remember his arguments for wanting laptops, but I remember that I had all sorts of arguments against that.
What do you think?
Re: Laptops
jordan on 2003-03-25T12:46:38
The big speed difference between laptops and desktops has typically been the speed of the disks. The small disks they cram into laptops are usually slower.
I believe the fastest laptop disk you can get is 5400 RPM, while they are coming out with 10000 RPM IDE disks now for desktops (you can get 15000 RPM SCSI). Also, you can gain some speed advantages on a high-end desktop by running multiple disks and distributing the disk load. I have a laptop that I swap in a disk for the DVD player though, and use an external CD player if I need it.
I'm a big believer in laptops, myself, although I don't know if I would be if they were bolted down.
For me, the most frustrating thing to productivity is if my work environment is not exactly as I expect it to be. With a laptop, I can work anywhere and things are where I expect them to be.
Where I work, they use laptops where you might expect small servers to be used. They have a server cabinet full of pull-out drawers that have laptops in them. These are all for these specific apps that require a lot of dedicated systems and a lot of redundancy. It's a legacy app that runs really really fast on modern hardware, so the speed is not an issue.
I think the big advantage to laptops for maintenance is that so much of the hardware you need is all there and integrated. Nobody will install an odd sound card or a different disk. You can quickly swap the entire system out and it'll be the same. With desktops, there's always the inevitable drift in configurations.
That being said, they are more expensive and more difficult to service. Actually, if you are experienced with a certain model, it's pretty easy to swap in and out memory, disks, even displays and main logic boards. They do a lot of that where I work, it doesn't take long and the various swapped components always work together.
I think, ultimately, it's more a management issue than a technical one. If you support desktops, some dweeb in administration is going to start buying cheap-disk-of-the-month or off-brand-sound-card-o-matic, even motherboard-of-the-week. That can make support a nightmare.
Re: Laptops
ziggy on 2003-03-25T15:55:06
All the limitations of laptops aside, I do think it can be easier to outfit a lab with laptops than desktops. I don't know the logic your friend was using, but the easiest justification I've seen is on the lifecycle cost.Machines are going to break, so you need to have spare parts on hand from a PC organ bank. Desktops change constantly, and there's a risk that what you have on hand will be incompatible with what you need to fix. Laptops cycle less frequently, and there is much less variability over time. Laptops provide their own organ bank as they start to break -- moreso than a lab full of random parts from random PCs acquired over a long period of time.
Machines for a lab are also purchased in bulk to reduce overall cost. I'd expect that a college lab needs functional machines over highly performant onces, so buying closer to the trailing edge also helps to reduce costs. It also increases the chances that you can get a few dozen machines with identical configurations at the same price or less than newer desktops that are harder to maintain over time.
Insanity
gizmo_mathboy on 2003-03-28T04:51:23
That would be my word for using laptops in a university lab setting. I know, I am going through an upgrade cycle at a university lab.
You can't buy near the trailing edge. These machines have to last 3 years minimum. That means getting the most performance per dollar, there is no comparison between laptops and desktops.
Others have written about some of the physical and peripheral issues. You brought up cannibalization for parts and dealing with a variety of configurations. You can by lots more similar machines with desktops than laptops. I can cannibalize within that pool if I need to.
Desktops are much more commoditized than laptops. About all you can realistically interchange between different laptops are memory and hard drives. I can swap hard drives, cd roms, video, pci cards, network cards, dvd roms, etc. It is significanly easier to crack open a desktop and exchange innards than with laptops. I know I do it on a semi-regular basis with my laptops (I like to fiddle with them way too much) and I'm always nervous I'll break something and render them useless.
Laptops only make sense when you can give it to the person using it and can trust them to return it.
Laptops are about mobility. That is there only advantage.
