[OPLINTECH] OPLINTECH Digest, Vol 129, Issue 11

[Tim Burns]

Thanks for responding :)  I’ve answered your questions and responded to comments inline.

From: Joe Knueven <joe at gtownlibrary.net<mailto:joe at gtownlibrary.net>>
In the interest of brainstorming, a couple of questions with that configuration comes to mind.
First, do you have significant space limitations?

No space issue. Patron stations currently have a 17” and a (largish) tower on the physical desktop.

 I ask, because while all in one systems have a slick visual appearance, they are more difficult to upgrade, and a 23” monitor combined with some manner of small form factor PC is liable to be cheaper and the monitor typically has a longer useful life than a PC.  (for instance, from what I’ve seen, monitors break far less frequently than hard drives and motherboards)

Last summer I upgraded a large lab of Apple iMac all-in-ones. (RAM and swapped from HDD to SDD) If that experience is typical, it’s not difficult. I think they usually (with the exception of software) replace rather than upgrade here. (I’m new.)

Second, what kind of tasks are your public working on?

When I walk through folks are using web browsers. Facebook, games, youTube. In the past the lab was used for teaching (Office, Basics, few other topics- no CAD or high end Photoshop…) I expect to see more “cloud” oriented computing happening.

 Around here, they are primarily playing online games, working in online interfaces (for college or work or for social media), or once in a great while using an office program.  If your patron’s behavior is similar, you might find that it’s a better value proposition to trade an i5 for an i3 or even a fairly current generation Pentium processor in favor of the SSD.  With the SSD you see a performance boost in almost any activity whereas with the tasks I’ve described you will barely notice the difference between a Pentium and an i5 from the same generation.

Agreed. I just replaced my system drive at home with SSD. The performance boost is incredible. (dual quad-core (Xeon) processors, 16Gb RAM, dual gigabit ethernet … i mostly just do Facebook) My shopping notes reflect the i5 is dropping in price as its popularity increases… I’m worried about selecting Pentium - due to closing an upgrade door… (my home system- I can’t upgrade to the latest OS, due to processor, even though the system is only 10 years old)

The other thing worth considering, there are a few generations of the i-class processors at this point, and some of the most recent ones have very low power requirements.  It might be worth checking to see if you can get one of those to save on electric over the life of the system.
All that said, I think cpubenchmark is useful as described and 8 GB sounds like a good place to standardize on ram if you can afford to.

Joseph Knueven


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