<p dir="ltr">Old machines have fans ready to die. Some brands have more than one.</p>
<p dir="ltr">For medium to large scale roll outs, the thin client model can't be beat for price, installation cost, ongoing maintenance.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The next phase of a roll out like APS would provide something like a chromebook, some can be purchased new for under $200, with some network connection wizardry and a spice client that connects to a central Ovirt cloud providing a full Linux desktop. This will still have battery issues as an ongoing maintenance issue. Most of the tiny cpu laptops are also fanless and only use SSD storage. What's missing in these is a sturdy case.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Ok. Enough OT discussion. As far as getting used lcd displays goes, I don't recommend even looking. As Jeff pointed out, older ones with non-led backlighting are crappy and heading to an ill-timed death. As far as I've seen over the years, lcd monitors are used until they die or become too horrid to use. So finding usable used ones is highly unlikely.</p>
<p dir="ltr">That said, the best place to find bulk used gear is ebay. Business hire teams to scavange out old gear and those teams dump batches on ebay. </p>
<p dir="ltr">With gift of 59 PCs, I would plan on about 10-15 being unusable and would set aside another 15 as spares. So only 30 machines to deploy. Microcenter has cheap new monitors at $70 and a handfull of "refurbished" ones for less.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The most important thing learned from the APS project is what level of computer use has a measurable, positive impact on student education. The parents that spearheaded the thin client process did some good analysis of student performance as they added systems to the classrooms. The tipping point was 3:1 students to computers. It basically requires students to use the computers for 2 hours a day, every day to make a change in academic performance. A computer "lab" that students use an hour a week is a waste of time. Might as well give them to the office staff and teachers.</p>
<p dir="ltr">So before a computer rollout, the question must be asked "How will they be used?". APS showed clearly that the teachers that "got it" instantly incorporated the computers into the daily process and their kids benefited from looking up everything (universal library) and creative projects (documents and presentations first, video later). Other teachers used them as typewriters (old computer lab methods) and showed little student improvement. Some teachers used the included games (mostly puzzle games and some math "action" games) as reward time for students. Those students focused on their desk work more to get the game time. Academic improvement in that group was also noted.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The most important thing we heard from teachers was anything brought into the classroom must work all the time with no failures in front of the students. If a single machine dies, that student sits idle. Chalkboards don't fail. A tiny bit of teacher training to show how to connect the systems if a student unplugs it and how to force one to reboot with the understanding that nothing could fail software wise on the classroom machine went a very long way towards teacher acceptance. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Computers are useful in educational environments as long as they are appropriate in the setting and used for something other than drill and test exercises. If old systems are used, hot swap spares must be ready to be drop in replacements and staff must be ready to run to do the swap. With 2000 thin clients rolled out, we saw around 10-20 fail within 10 days. The servers had a horrible failure rate due to vendor/APS corruption. A server failure was a school-wide nightmare. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Networking is also fun. The fans in most switches are horrible noise. Wads of cables are a mess. Kids unplug things and reconnect things wrong. A single looped switch can bring down the entire building.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The APS project was an outstanding success despite all of the issues. The followup system wide rollout was a total, corruption induced failure. Jeff, Aaron and I were not involved in that debacle. If we had been, it would have worked. I still giggle a bit that a trio of motivated Linux geeks performed a task that IBM couldn't replicate even with our recipe.</p>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Oct 5, 2016 6:30 PM, "Jeff Hubbs" <<a href="mailto:jhubbslist@att.net">jhubbslist@att.net</a>> wrote:<br type="attribution"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<div class="m_7644422760542515012moz-cite-prefix">Especially after the Atlanta Public
Schools masterpiece/debacle (depending on how you look at it) that
Jim, Aaron, and I did a few years ago, I would advise this school
to tread very, very carefully. That donation from SSA can turn
into a leaden albatross very easily - perhaps so easily that there
is no way to avoid it. <br>
<br>
The basic problem always seems to come down to trading up-front
cost and labor avoidance for some combination of up-front and
follow-on labor cost. It's the latter that really hurts because it
accrues over time.<br>
<br>
Let's assume all the PCs are the same, were procured at about the
same time by SSA off either GSA or some other blanket procurement,
and they all function perfectly when you receive them. If you
deploy so as to depend on the disk drives in each one, the far end
of the so-called "bathtub curve" distribution of drive failures is
out there waiting for you and when you arrive at it, you'll be
sinking a lot of labor into drive replacement and system recovery
that you could avoid by designing to get rid of the disk drives (a
separate calculation would help to determine if it is worth it to
remove or just unplug the drives; in this day and age I doubt it
would be worth it to make a single massive array out of them and
use the array for infrastructure). <br>
<br>
We deployed 2200 thin-client seats in seven schools, up to 500 per
school, and we were trying to stick to one app server for every
100 seats (we would likely have that number at 400-500 today).
Even at just 53 machines it would definitely call for some sort of
netboot/central-app arrangement like the one we built or the labor
intensity would just be ridiculous.<br>
<br>
But more to your original question, I would first compare the
goods and labor cost of monitors against that of 53 all-up
monitor/thin-client combos before even agreeing to take the
donation. When we tried to bid for the job of building out the
rest of the APS district, I worked out many of the details that
would be associated with assembling monitor/thin-client combos at
industrial scale - tens of thousands of seats' worth. When you do
that, you have to sweat the labor intensity of every single step
in the process (e.g. screwing monitors to thin clients, loading
trucks) and plan things so as to keep costs from scaling with
volume to the greatest degree possible. <br>
<br>
Recall that the CCF backlights in monitors dim over time and if
you source monitors that are already five years old or older,
that's a lot of CCF life that's already behind them. If you were
to go for refurbs, you'd want to know if new CCFs were part of the
refurb.<br>
<br>
The power consumption of an idling tower PC is a lot greater than
that of a thin client; the latter of which only needs to run a
little dippy CPU and not much RAM if all that it's really doing is
running Xorg and perhaps a few other daemons to handle sound and
so forth. Even the power supply fans in PCs, if you get 8-10 of
them in a classroom, make a fair amount of noise. <br>
<br>
On 10/4/16 9:04 AM, Vernard Martin wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif">An acquaintance of mine
that runs a small private school has recently given the
opportunity to acquire 59 computers from the Social Security
Administration but no monitors. I'm not sure that they have an
OS currently loaded on them and I am, of course, strongly
suggesting that she go with an open source Linux-based
solution either way. However, their immediate needs are a
supply of flat-panel monitors or the units aren't very
useful. <br>
<br>
They are based in the Atlanta area. Since I'm no longer living
in Atlanta, I'm doing all this remotely. Its a challenge as
you can imagine :) Does anyone have any suggestions on where I
can call around looking for donations? And barring that, does
anyone know where I can purchase around 60 refurbish monitors
in bulk? I figure 14" 1024x768 would be the low-end units that
would work, especially if they are being donated. Anything
less just might not be worth it in the long run.<br>
<br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif">Any leads would be
appreciated.</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif"><br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif">Vernard</div>
</div>
<br>
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