Network Computing | ||||||||||||||||||
Issue
25 - September 2000
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Early in the morning, piles of cardboard boxes lined the corridor and staff running up and down were busy checking the machines to make sure that they were in good condition and ready for use. Then the staff wheeled them to different locations lot by lot for the scheduled replacement, and the real hard work had just begun. The setting was not the aircraft depot of the Hong Kong International Airport. It was the campus of the CityU in which the PC upgrade exercise was well underway. After months of discussion, the University finally made the decision in November 1999 to embark on the large-scale PC upgrade exercise. Funding Sources and PC Configurations There were 3 sources of funding for this exercise:
The CSC was commissioned to be the central co-ordinator for this exercise and a tender was offered to Dell Computer, the world's largest direct computer systems company, after careful evaluation of several PC models. Almost all departments (22 academic and 19 non-academic) were involved in this campus-wide exercise and apart from the standard configurations, many departments have also opted for a change of their monitors as well. Below is a glance of the advanced models selected for you:
On top of this, other peripherals such as reborn card, modem and zip drive were supplied upon individual request. Currently, there are still some 700 student and staff PCs in the CSC and the Library (LIB) pending for the final approval of funding before they can be replaced. Upgrade Preparation & the Installation Team This largest ever PC upgrade exercise
since the foundation of the University naturally required a thorough
and meticulous preparation before the actual installation took place.
The CSC has overseen the whole process: liaison with all the participating
departments via the CSC representatives, labelling all the PCs that
were to be upgraded, drawing up the installation schedule while taking
into account the departments requests, holding numerous meetings
with the Dell engineers and users to finalise all the details and
following up the shipment of new machines to make sure that they would
arrive on time. The team was working diligently to try to meet the timetable, and 1,000 machines were already done by mid-August. Hopefully, the installation will be completed by the end of August 2000 as scheduled. Problems Encountered Problems would be inevitable for such a large scale campus-wide exercise, and below were just some prominent ones:
Destinations of Old Machines One may be curious about where the old machines will go, as there are really quite a lot of them (over 2,000). For the better models, either the departments concerned will retain them after giving full explanation and given proper approval, or the CSC will collect them to run the "Computer for Student-in-need Programme 2000" for the benefit of our students. For the rest, however, they will be disposed of by the FO and then wait for the open sale later. The success of the PC upgrade exercise depends not only on the advanced models chosen, but also on the complementary campus devices and network that support them. Therefore, the latter will need to be upgraded accordingly in order to guarantee the jump in performance as envisaged. The CSC will, as usual, pay heed to every aspect to ensure all things intact and done to users' satisfaction. |
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