If you're buying more than a few PCs at a time, you need to start thinking about management, installation, service contracts, and other issues.

When it comes to rolling out tens or hundreds of PCs, the issues you need to consider are considerably different to buying a PC for home or a SOHO. As always, cost is an important factor, but here's where the similarity ends.

High-end graphics and audio subsystems might be great for playing games or DVDs, but are an unnecessary expense and distraction in an office environment where the majority of employees use nothing more taxing than a word processor, spreadsheet, or Web browser.

Deployment and management issues are also vital. Installing the OS and applications on more than a few PCs can be incredibly time consuming. For large corporate rollouts, an SOE (standard operating environment) can be an enormous time saver. Centralised management software also becomes essential.

Central management software

The Desktop Management Interface (DMI) is an interface that manages and keeps track of hardware and software components from a central location. DMI was created to automate system management for large numbers of computers.

DMI is hardware and operating system independent, which means it's easy for vendors to adopt. It's also mappable to existing management protocols such as SNMP.

DMI consists of four components:

• Management Information Format (MIF): An MIF is a text file that contains specific information about the hardware and software being used on a computer. An MIF file consists of attributes, which describe each of the components being used.

• Management Interface (MI): The MI communicates with the SP and allows applications to directly access, manage, and control desktop systems, components, and peripherals.

• Service Provider (SP): The SP collects information from products and manages the information in the MIF database. It also passes the information to management applications via the MI and between itself and manageable components via the CI.

• Component Interface (CI): The CI is an application program interface that sends status information to the appropriate MIF file via the SP. Some of the commands include the Get and Set command that modifies the MIF as needed and the Event command that notifies management software of critical events.

There are many software suites on offer that help you manage your PCs and software images from a central location. Compaq for example offers a chain of access on demand applications that can monitor your product and check to see if for example someone's hard drive is working outside normal operating conditions.

If a hard drive does appear to be playing up, the software automatically makes a service call and a Compaq specialist comes out to your work site and rectifies the problem.

However, these management systems are also proactive, and attempt to fix small problems before they become big ones. For example, they can delete temp files when a hard disk is getting full. Addressing such problems proactively can increase the productivity levels in your company.

Management software can also keep an eye on what versions of software everyone is using and upgrades can be implemented from a central location. Users only have to restart their PCs for the changes to take place.

There are many levels of management that a customer can make use of; it all depends on budget and requirements. These management systems are becoming ever more powerful and extremely more vital when it comes to managing hundreds of PCs.

Vendors are usually happy to assist in creating disk images to roll out a large number of PCs. All you need to do is give the vendor very specific information about your requirements. The vendor will then create a custom gold master image, which it will hold onto, and use if you order more PCs.

Stability of driver images

This is one of the toughest questions that vendors have to answer. In most cases vendors will guarantee that their images will work for at least 12 months from when the product is launched.

In many cases vendors will not be able to source some of the components that you have been using for the last two years.

Components such as graphics cards tend to have short product life cycles, which means that it may be difficult for the vendor to find them after more than a year, unless new products are backward compatible with the older drivers.

If you can forecast how many PCs you may need in the future, the vendor may put aside some extra PCs. This way when you need additional PCs, your vendor will be able to give you the exact PC you initially purchased from them.

Keeping all this in mind, we requested some basic corporate PCs from the major brand-name vendors, including Acer, Apple, Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. All these vendors except HP were able to send in PCs to meet our deadline. Apple was not able to send in one of the new G4-based iMacs, but sent two older G3-based iMacs, which will still be in circulation for the foreseeable future.

CPUs

Besides the Apple iMacs, all the PCs that we tested were equipped with Intel processors. We received mostly Intel Pentium 4 based PCs and one Intel Celeron machine.

Generally speaking, the P4 processors are designed for business users while Celeron processors are intended for home users. However, this distinction is far from clear-cut, and Celeron processors are also used for low-cost corporate desktops.

However, for long-term contracts, we don't think a Celeron based machine will be able to stay the distance with a Pentium-based machine because the Celeron has a much shorter shelf life.

RAM

Three out of the four PCs were equipped with SDRAM while the Acer was equipped with DDR-RAM, which uses double the data rate of SDRAM. Three of the PCs had 256MB of RAM and one had 128MB, which we feel is the minimum for a desktop PC running Windows 2000 or XP.

Graphics Subsystem

Even without worrying about games, the graphics subsystem can increase the overall performance of your PC. Three out of the four PCs that we tested used AGP cards while Compaq went for a motherboard with an integrated graphics subsystem. Integrated solutions are less expensive, however they lack in performance.

I/O Ports

Like with many notebooks these days we are seeing more and more PCs sport additional USB ports rather than legacy ports. You can however buy adapters that will let you plug your old legacy equipment into your new PC.

What to look for when buying a corporate PC

We weighted the following criteria to evaluate the suitability of each PC for corporate use.

• Cost--30 percent.

• Ongoing service and support--20 percent.

• Performance--22.5 percent: Processor speed as well as the amount of RAM and the graphics subsystem play an important role in the overall performance of your PC.

• Monitor--12.5 percent: Look at the overall display quality including evenness of illumination, clarity, and colours and resolutions supported.

• Workmanship and design 7.5 percent: Look at ergonomics, robustness and durability as well as expandability.

• Multimedia--5 percent: Look at the audio chip that's been used as well as the sound quality and volume of the speakers. Look at the type and number of I/O ports.

• Mouse and Keyboard--2.5 percent: Look for good feedback, support, and colour differentiation in your keyboard. With the mouse look at the general ergonomics as well as the button size, travel, and feedback.

The April 2002 issue of ZDNet Australia's Technology & Business Magazine contains reviews of desktop PCs, including Editor's Choice Awards for the best products. For subscription information, visit Technology & Business.

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