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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mani1 who wrote (111096)	5/16/2000 12:21:00 AM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 1577146

Re: Are you the IT manager? Hi Mani, I wear a couple of hats - I work at a Non Profit institution where my role is different on each project. Currently I work mainly on two projects, a small one where I'm a pointy headed boss pushing paper and bothering people, and a large one, where much of my time is basically being an IS manager / systems analyst. I still make sure that I spend significant time hands-on, doing programming, systems administration, and hardware setup. It helps me feel like I have clue. Are the machines mission critical? Not in the 7 x 24 running the bank's books sense, but if a system is ever down, it is still very bad. Our servers are in a controlled environment room with big refrigerator sized UPS units. There was some questioning about going with a VAR and Athlons for PCs instead of Compaq or Gateway, but I've been getting the configurations we need at good prices, and the systems have been completely trouble free - and they really fly on the LP routines we use for modeling - the performance has been spectacular. On regular applications (word, etc.) I don't think there is much of a difference between a K6, a PIII, a Celeron, or an Athlon. All our work is basically done in response to grants from various sources. If I can save a thousand bucks on a procurement we can spend an extra day and a half doing real work (isn't overhead awful?). It's not like a business where you can justify spending a lot of money by saying it will increase profits and so pay for itself. Our "revenue" is fixed so it's vital that we get the best price/performance from our computer procurements. Regards, Dan