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Issue
25 - September 2000
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PC Upgrade
in Full Full Swing
By
Noel Laam
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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:
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Central University Fund - for
the PCs in the academic departments and requires the departments
to allocate a matching fund for this exercise. The funds were
looked after by the CSC.
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Central IT Fund - for the student
PCs for open access in various departments, and was provided
by the VP/PI.
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Individual Fund - for the PCs
in non-academic departments and was supported by the respective
line managers.
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:
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Model Selected
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Number of PCs
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Number of Monitors
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Staff PCs in academic departments
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Dell Precision WS200 - Pentium III 866MHZ, 30GB Hard disk,
128MB RAM, Sound Card, Speakers/headset, DVD
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961
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732
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Staff PCs in non-academic departments
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Dell Optiplex GX200 - Pentium III 800MHZ, 30GB Hard disk,
128MB RAM, Sound Card, Speakers/headset, DVD
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497
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254
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Student PCs in various departments
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Dell Optiplex GX200 -Pentium III 800MHZ, 30GB Hard disk,
128MB RAM, Sound Card, Speakers/headset, DVD
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795
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436
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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 actual installation work was carried out by a designated team
of the Dell Computer with the supervision and assistance of the
CSC. This installation team of 40 technicians was divided into
group of 10 and they headed towards various departments starting
from early August. On average, each technician could upgrade 2
machines a day as the installation work was more complicated than
it might appear: all data and systems/programmes have to be transferred
from the old machine to the new one and careful configuration
of the latter was needed to ensure the network compatibility,
which was tedious and time-consuming.
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:
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Some old devices such as writing
pad, modem cards etc. took much longer time to be transferred
to the new machines.
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Installation scheduling was rather
complicated as some departments changed their time slots from
time to time, and their requests for deferral of installation
also affected the smooth operation as planned.
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The CSC provided temporary storage
for machines for some particular departments, as they simply
did not have the space to pile up the PCs.
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Death on Arrival (DOA) - the
phenomenon that the PCs were not in working condition when
they arrived - was found due to transportation failure, and
replacement was ordered immediately to try to make up for
the time lost.
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Some hard disks in the old machines
were not compatible to the ones in the new PCs, and this ended
up in great difficulties for the technicians as much more
time and effort was needed to upgrade such computers.
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Since the installation team was
not familiar with the campus network and the environment in
general, the CSC staff have to provide ad hoc hardware and
software support whenever needed to avoid any unnecessary
delay.
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Some users failed to backup their
hard disk or clear up their data in their old machines, which
might lead to serious consequences.
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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