Advice

Clauric

Hey,

Looking for some advice. Place I am working (charity) has a number of PCs that are about 5 years old. They are P4 3GHz machine, running XP (SP3)with 512Mb RAM, and 35G HDs, with Office 2010. They are needed to run large Excel files, word processing, payroll programs, and time and attendance systems. At least of the motherboards have died in the last 6 months, with another 2 only partially functioning (e.g. USB ports, network adapters, etc are dead).

A company a few days ago delivered a number of "new" PCs for us to use. They are Dual Core 1.88GHz machines, with 75G HDS, 1Gb RAM, running XP (SP3), with no wireless connections, and smaller monitors. They also only have Office 2007 on some, and 2003 on others. On closer inspection, they are all turn out to be refurbished machines, with non-USB mouse and keyboard.

I've been asked by the manager of the charity whether it is worth our while using them. This is due to the fact that each machine needs about 4 hours to install the newest versions of the software, and about another 5 hours to transfer files from one machine to the next (they only have one HD connector in the machine). I am also the only person in the charity with IT experience, and I would have to undertake the setting up of the machines in addition to my normal duties.

I would like your advice on whether it is worth our while installing them, or would we be better off buying new ones (e.g. Dells with no monitors, <€400).

Many thanks.

chin_grin

Could you not "clone" one of the running hdd's and just mirror it on to one of the newer ones? I think four hours is a little ott when setting up a new machine.

This one is free and can burn on to a bootable cd.

http://clonezilla.org/

FSL

Put one of your existing hard drives into one of the new machines and boot it.

If it boots O.K. (it might want to reactivate as a lot has changed) and all your software runs then it would be worth cloning the old drives to the new ones.

I would use a bootable USB stick with a lightweight linux distro you can then clone using the dd command. You can then use gparted to extend the partition from the 35GB cloned to the 75GB of the new drive. I've found Windows sometimes won't extend a partition when the disk has been cloned from a smaller disk.

Clauric

Sorry, I should have pointed out that there is only 1 HD slot and connection cable in the new machines!

Firblog

Set one machine up with all the software that you require, use the cloning software to clone that drive to one of the others using one of these
shouldn't take more than half an hour per machine