Sub-Survey - Current PC power

Yahoo Archive
1
We have approximately 75 PC's the average being a P4 with 1GB of RAM. We tend to upgrade PC's on a regular basis throughout the year...average about one new PC per month. In addition to Vantage 8.x requirements we also run several other programs that require additional horse power. Typically engineering gets the latest and greatest then they are filtered down from there to other departments the final location being the shop floor for data collection terminals.

We are currently in the process of testing 8.03 however have had some "show stopers" that are preventing us from moving forward. We hope that these will be resolved soon so that we can begin using version 8.x to take advantage of the new technology.

Dave Miller
Prince Industries, Inc.

-------------- Original message --------------
From: "Todd Anderson" <todd.anderson@...>
Ok, one issue posted is the horsepower required to run V8 as a reason for
not upgrading just yet.

How many PC's do you have?

How fast is the "Average" PC?

Does your company commit to a "Standard" rollover on your PC inventory? As
in, if you have 80 PC's and you want to rotate your stock every 4 years you
need to buy 20 PC's every year ...

I run into a number of companies through my business that only buy PC's when
they need additional horsepower and do not budget in advance. The problem
with this scenario is that if your software is stable and not being
upgraded, and it works just fine on your existing stock of PC's you never
buy anything new. Three to four years go by and then something like V8
pops up and you find that 80-90% of your PC inventory doesn't cut it and
management has a heart attack ...

Todd Anderson




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
2
Ok, one issue posted is the horsepower required to run V8 as a reason for
not upgrading just yet.

How many PC's do you have?

How fast is the "Average" PC?

Does your company commit to a "Standard" rollover on your PC inventory? As
in, if you have 80 PC's and you want to rotate your stock every 4 years you
need to buy 20 PC's every year ...

I run into a number of companies through my business that only buy PC's when
they need additional horsepower and do not budget in advance. The problem
with this scenario is that if your software is stable and not being
upgraded, and it works just fine on your existing stock of PC's you never
buy anything new. Three to four years go by and then something like V8
pops up and you find that 80-90% of your PC inventory doesn't cut it and
management has a heart attack ...

Todd Anderson
3
We have some Pentium III workstations scattered throughout our company
(gasp!). They run Vantage 6.1 just as fast as any of our other
workstations. They also do a fine job with word processing, spreadsheets
and email (hmm... all the tools we need). We upgrade PCs every year -
mostly in our Engineering department. Our business is building skylights -
as long as our workers have tools that do a good job, we are fine. Every
computer in our building has a 19" flat panel LCD (even the PIII's). It is
amazing how good the computer seems to run with a decent monitor :) Our
employees don't need cutting edge word processing and email - it just isn't
necessary. Nor do we need cutting edge ERP when our current system (v4 in
1999 to v 6.1 now) has been doing an excellent job at a fraction of the
power of version 8.

Vantage 8 will take a lot of work to implement (1 - 2 months testing and
prep). New server? Add to that replacing and upgrading workstations (even
though there isn't a need since they are working fine with 6.1). In
addition, there will be changes to our company procedures (v 8 is different
than v 6 in many ways). Spend another couple months after implementation
fixing the minor things we missed before upgrading. Is it worth it?? Our
company has been on Vantage since 1999. Version 8 would have to improve our
productivity 10-fold to be worth the upgrade. I'm not ruling it out in the
future - but it will be the distant future (if at all).


Chris Gitzlaff
Major Industries



-----Original Message-----
From: vantage@yahoogroups.com [mailto:vantage@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of
Todd Anderson
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 8:39 AM
To: 'Vantage @ YahooGroups. Com'
Subject: [Vantage] Sub-Survey - Current PC power



Ok, one issue posted is the horsepower required to run V8 as a reason for
not upgrading just yet.

How many PC's do you have?

How fast is the "Average" PC?

Does your company commit to a "Standard" rollover on your PC inventory? As
in, if you have 80 PC's and you want to rotate your stock every 4 years you
need to buy 20 PC's every year ...

I run into a number of companies through my business that only buy PC's when
they need additional horsepower and do not budget in advance. The problem
with this scenario is that if your software is stable and not being
upgraded, and it works just fine on your existing stock of PC's you never
buy anything new. Three to four years go by and then something like V8
pops up and you find that 80-90% of your PC inventory doesn't cut it and
management has a heart attack ...

Todd Anderson






[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
4
126 workstations total: (34 Vantage licenses and 55 Data Collection)

30 Machining workstations
30 CAD workstations
13 Engineering workstations
53 Mfg-support, Admin, Purchasing, Finance, Data Collection,
CADviewer, etc

CAD, Machining and Engieering workstations turn over every 3 years. As
they come out of primary manufacturing roles they get second/third lives
as administration workstations, data collection and CADviewers. At this
point anything being decommissioned from manufacturing is a 2.8-3.0GHz
workstation with 1-2GB RAM.

Our average CAD/CNC/ENG workstation is 3.4GHz with 2GB RAM
The average Vantage workstation is 2.8GHz with 1GB RAM

Fortunately that was the case before we decided to proceed with v8.
So what I saved in workstation upgrades I'm putting into network
infrastructure... 10/100 switches being replaced with GigE switches.

My biggest investment was in the new server:
Dell PowerEdge 2950 with dual Dual-Core Xeon Processor 5160, 3.00GHz,
1333MHz FSB
8GB RAM, PERC 5/i RAID 10 with 4, 73GB 15K SAS, Windows 2003 Enterprise.

Lee Ingalls
Commercial Tool & Die


________________________________

From: vantage@yahoogroups.com [mailto:vantage@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf
Of Todd Anderson
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 9:39 AM
To: 'Vantage @ YahooGroups. Com'
Subject: [Vantage] Sub-Survey - Current PC power



Ok, one issue posted is the horsepower required to run V8 as a reason
for
not upgrading just yet.

How many PC's do you have?

How fast is the "Average" PC?

Does your company commit to a "Standard" rollover on your PC inventory?
As
in, if you have 80 PC's and you want to rotate your stock every 4 years
you
need to buy 20 PC's every year ...


Todd Anderson
5
We have roughly 50 pcs.



Average PC is approx 866 MHz. Purchased new server an installed Citrix
last year for this purpose. Squeeze the life out of those 866s.



Bruce Butler

IT Manager

Knappe & Koester, Inc.

_____

From: vantage@yahoogroups.com [mailto:vantage@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf
Of Todd Anderson
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 9:39 AM
To: 'Vantage @ YahooGroups. Com'
Subject: [Vantage] Sub-Survey - Current PC power



Ok, one issue posted is the horsepower required to run V8 as a reason
for
not upgrading just yet.

How many PC's do you have?

How fast is the "Average" PC?

Does your company commit to a "Standard" rollover on your PC inventory?
As
in, if you have 80 PC's and you want to rotate your stock every 4 years
you
need to buy 20 PC's every year ...

I run into a number of companies through my business that only buy PC's
when
they need additional horsepower and do not budget in advance. The
problem
with this scenario is that if your software is stable and not being
upgraded, and it works just fine on your existing stock of PC's you
never
buy anything new. Three to four years go by and then something like V8
pops up and you find that 80-90% of your PC inventory doesn't cut it and
management has a heart attack ...

Todd Anderson





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
6
PCs: 65 or so...never really know ;)

How Fast:
Office: P4 & AMD around 2.4Ghz - 1GB RAM - mostly....me and a few others have old 1Ghz/1GB machines
Plant Data Collection: Celeron 500Mhz with 64MB RAM

RollOver:
Every couple years we slowly enrich the pool in a given area as conditions allow. Usually 1-2 new PCs each month for 8-12 months. That's about as fast as I can prep & swap anyway. Have been trying to meet V8.0 requriements but one cycle two years ago of 1Ghz machines that I thought would now does not because the bar was raised along the way.

-Todd C.



-----Original Message-----
From: vantage@yahoogroups.com [mailto:vantage@yahoogroups.com]On Behalf Of Todd Anderson
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 8:39 AM
To: 'Vantage @ YahooGroups. Com'
Subject: [Vantage] Sub-Survey - Current PC power



Ok, one issue posted is the horsepower required to run V8 as a reason for
not upgrading just yet.

How many PC's do you have?

How fast is the "Average" PC?

Does your company commit to a "Standard" rollover on your PC inventory? As
in, if you have 80 PC's and you want to rotate your stock every 4 years you
need to buy 20 PC's every year ...

I run into a number of companies through my business that only buy PC's when
they need additional horsepower and do not budget in advance. The problem
with this scenario is that if your software is stable and not being
upgraded, and it works just fine on your existing stock of PC's you never
buy anything new. Three to four years go by and then something like V8
pops up and you find that 80-90% of your PC inventory doesn't cut it and
management has a heart attack ...

Todd Anderson







[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]