Fixing a Small Business Network

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I got a call from my daughter saying 2 of the machines will not print and one is slow. It is 2 of the all in one computers which were bought previously by the old owner. They were working the last time I was there. So it means I have to drive in.

Terms/Conditions and a Support Agreement - this is more for the general community that might be thinking about supporting small businesses as a consultant.

Mentioned this above...

 

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Firstly, when it comes to desktop use or any basic use even if it involves a user,

My thoughts - under Win10 - i5 runs really nice if IvyBridge/Haswell - lots of grunt there for pretty much any office related thing, and Windows tends to keep the drivers updated as needed.

AMD - bit too early for Ryzen to be in the second-hand lease return market - and the earlier earthmover chips didn't get much of a win there - for IT purchasers, nobody ever got fired for choosing Intel.

RAM - 4GB is good enough for most purposes in the office - RAM is getting a bit cheaper these days, except for DDR4 due to the blockchain mining stuff.

SSD is the biggest thing one can do with older HW - even a cheap off-brand ones - but watch for sales from Samsung, SanDisk/Western Digital or Toshiba/OCZ - all are quality drives with those vendors.

 

[coxhaus]

Second hand - RAM is probably more relevant, and storage if not replacing with SSD's (SSD is a very cost effective bump on an older machine, and more reliable that 2 year old spinning rust)

I put 8 gigs of RAM in each machine. They don't do any real paging so I think 8 gigs is enough.

I thought about a SSD but they leave their PCs on all the time and it would add about $70 per machine. The main benefit from a SSD is the boot up time savings. The PC boots much faster with a SSD. Once the PC is running the difference is small since they are not paging.

I would not buy an i5 or less now days. I would only buy an i7 or Xeon right now. You could also wait for the new AMD coming out.

 

[coxhaus]

RAM - 4GB is good enough for most purposes in the office - RAM is getting a bit cheaper these days, except for DDR4 due to the blockchain mining stuff.

Sorry but I can not stand a Win 10 machine with only 4 gigs of RAM. They page too much. It drives me crazy.

I think 8 gigs is the bare minimum now.

 

[coxhaus]

I put an Intel server SSD in my laptop. I had one left over. My laptop boots really fast. It was a great addition.

PS
My laptop is a recycled Dell i7 2.7 Ghz laptop which is 3 years old. I installed an Intel wireless AC7260 board. It runs nice especially with the SSD but it does burn through a battery fast.

 

[RMerlin]

SSDs are often the best upgrade one can make to a computer (now that computers ship with sufficient RAM). Price has been continuously dropping, I recently got a great deal on a 1 TB Crucial SSD from Amazon, to replace the 256 GB Samsung + 2 TB HDD of my desktop. (primary SSD is an NVME Samsung, the 256 GB was an old Sata used as secondary). That 256 GB Samsung now lives in a new Qotom PC that runs XPC-NG and a Windows VM for my accountant.

Be careful with used/refurbished hardware. Always keep in mind the increased maintenance/service cost associated when calculating whether it's a good deal or not. Last year, I had a customer buy two refurbished HP desktops. The i7 4770 was even faster than their other desktops that I had built for them years ago. Unfortunately, one of these two desktops will crash once or twice a month, and when it happens, it will take down the whole network along it for some unknown reason. Half of the network becomes unreachable, as if the crashed PC was sending garbage/noise to the switch. Took a while to figure this one out. Unfortunately this was discovered after the 90 days warranty period. For now the customer decided to just reboot that PC whenever they come in the morning and they lost access to their LAN. Otherwise, my next step would probably to install a PCI-Express NIC. Those are cheap, yet the service call required would add nearly 50% to the price they paid for the PC itself, so for now they decided to just live with the problem...

In general I prefer new hardware. It might cost more now, but the PCs I used to build for my customers would generally get between 5 and 7 years of solid use, with very, very rarely hardware issues (I always went with quality parts, starting with power supplies they weighted more than an empty cardboard box). The only cases where I went with second hand PCs were for things like student lab computers, or computers that only get occasional use (like the two I mentioned above - they are used maybe 2-3 times a week for remote access by external consultants).

 

[sfx2000]

Dell and Apple - thru their outlet stores - e.g. openbox, scratch and dent, lease returns - generally they'll have the same warranty as new. I've bought from both, never had a problem with support from either if there were problems found (just like new hardware, sometimes things are dead fresh out of the box).

@coxhaus - I agree - 8GB is a good place to be for memory, 4MB would be the minimum, depends on the use cases.

 

[coxhaus]

The 5 Dell machines I bought came with a 1 year warranty. I deal with a company in Austin Texas called Discount Electronics and they are good people. I have been buying from them for many years. I had a problem with the first PC I bought when I connected it to my Dell Ultra Sharp 24 inch monitor with a HDMI to DVI connector. I took the machine back to them the next day. It turns out my old Dell DVI cable which came with my monitor when I bought it new would not work. Discount just gave me a free DVI cable since I was having problems and they said it would work. They have very good customer service.

I have been running the 5 Dell PCs for a couple of weeks now without any problems. The only problems seem to be the other machines which are not Dells. They were buying home machines which I don't think work very well for a business. The home machines have too many bells and whistles which can get tampered with that cause problems.

 

[System Error Message]

I put 8 gigs of RAM in each machine. They don't do any real paging so I think 8 gigs is enough.

I thought about a SSD but they leave their PCs on all the time and it would add about $70 per machine. The main benefit from a SSD is the boot up time savings. The PC boots much faster with a SSD. Once the PC is running the difference is small since they are not paging.

I would not buy an i5 or less now days. I would only buy an i7 or Xeon right now. You could also wait for the new AMD coming out.

I put 8 gigs of RAM in each machine. They don't do any real paging so I think 8 gigs is enough.

I thought about a SSD but they leave their PCs on all the time and it would add about $70 per machine. The main benefit from a SSD is the boot up time savings. The PC boots much faster with a SSD. Once the PC is running the difference is small since they are not paging.

I would not buy an i5 or less now days. I would only buy an i7 or Xeon right now. You could also wait for the new AMD coming out.

i have used said i5 with 4GB of ram, even for browsing it was absolutely terrible. Laptop in question was a dual core i5 U with a slow hard drive and a low end gt920mx

Dont be duped that just because it says an i5 that it is the minimum or one to go for or in anyway decent. Many brands confuse with models and dont quote me in regards to turbo either because i had to use throttlestop just to get it to perform decently by tweaking the CPU to be a lot faster and gain 25% better Pi performance from just tweaking.

On the desktop front, the minimum you need is a dual core 3Ghz on the intel front on the full iseries architecture, this is typically a pentium i think in naming and people have used it for low end gaming. If you can get better thats good. On the AMD side you have the ryzen quad core, and because this is a business, 2nd hand is unlikely in that the business may not buy these but rather lease as asset accounting when getting rid of or selling is a pain in some places, plus the support you get from a company like dell (i still advice against hp/lenovo).

On the ram front, 4GB was just too slow to do anything, even browse. This isnt linux where my opensuse server still uses 600MB of ram on boot and leaves space for a lot of things. Windows will use all the ram, and then page as it caches it, however a lot of machines are equipped with low end ram, during the swapping out process as data is added, that ram isnt going to be fast not to mention 4GB in single channel. Get yourself 8GB at least via 2x4GB or 2x8GB. Even 12GB (1x8GB or 1x4GB) is better than a single stick.

On the SSD front, it doesnt involve boot times. Paging, temporary files, etc, it significantly improves browsing (one reason why ARM is slow at this because of the preincluded slow flash). a 128GB SSD compared to a 1TB HDD in price, because you want to reduce the files on a normal desktop office machine. Every software you launch, files you work with, the launch times do matter so its not just for the OS. Remember the 0.4 second rule? In the past it was determined that taking longer than 0.4 seconds means the mind loses attention.

My suggestion though if you can, grab an i3/i5 8th gen (these are quad cores at least) or AMD quad core 2nd gen ryzen with at least 8GB of ram, with an SSD (256GB perhaps?). Dont think of this as extra cost for no gain, for every waiting for machine that takes less than 0.4 seconds you get more productivity so its a worthwhile investment. Just for reference, i gave my mum an intel skull canyon NUC with 2x8GB of ram, 512GB SSD, and that thing has a quad core i7 with a decent intel IGP (3x faster than the ones you get in newer i7s), and she only uses it for basic use (browser, MS office, email, etc), mainly because i wasnt making full use of it and she needed a PC asap but also it turns out to be really good because it also saves a lot of space and runs everything fast.

 

[coxhaus]

All the 1600 RAM in the Dell PCs I bought is setup dual channel.

As stated above I hate paging in Windows. I have on my machine been known in the past to add a lot of extra RAM and turn off paging in Windows. You just have to be careful in what you run to not go bigger than your RAM.

If I was going to add a SSD then I would probably bump the RAM up as well. Running extra RAM will extend the life of the SSD. You hate to wear your SSD out doing Windows paging.

 

[coxhaus]

My daughter called and they have a new person coming on board. I had to buy another Dell PC like the above. I have Windows 10 and all the updates on now and it is ready to go.

My daughter needs a network scanner. They have an older Brother all in one scanner, printer, fax and what ever else which they use just for printing. I tried installing the latest Brother drivers on a test PC but it wants to update all the firmware. I decided against the firmware update because I might break something. They use it every day. I will add another one for backup which I will develop the scanner on.

Any know of any cheap good network based scanner? It can be a scanner printer that's OK.

 

[sfx2000]

My daughter called and they have a new person coming on board. I had to buy another Dell PC like the above. I have Windows 10 and all the updates on now and it is ready to go.

Any know of any cheap good network scanners? It can be a scanner printer that's OK.

Pick up a newer Brother All-In-One - the most recent round of products (both Laser and Ink Jet) are very capable, and the consumables pricing is one of the better in the business...

I moved from HP/Epson to Brother sometime back... and have not regretted it one single bit.

Staples and Office-Depot seem to be the place to check out and perhaps buy...

 

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Any know of any cheap good network scanners?

Response is above once a moderator clears it - must be a keyword in there somewhere... gist was go with Brother

 

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All the 1600 RAM in the Dell PCs I bought is setup dual channel.

As stated above I hate paging in Windows. I have on my machine been known in the past to add a lot of extra RAM and turn off paging in Windows. You just have to be careful in what you run to not go bigger than your RAM.

If I was going to add a SSD then I would probably bump the RAM up as well. Running extra RAM will extend the life of the SSD. You hate to wear your SSD out doing Windows paging.

8GB on Win10, I don't see much paging activity there - the current Win10 release is pretty good about compressing memory, and it's more SSD friendly.

Gaming or Developers - I would go with 16GB or even 32GB, but for normal usage - 8GB is plenty with Win10 - going dual-channel with two DIMM's helps with the iGPU performance, but if that's not a priority, a single DIMM is sufficient.

 

[sfx2000]

SSDs are often the best upgrade one can make to a computer (now that computers ship with sufficient RAM). Price has been continuously dropping, I recently got a great deal on a 1 TB Crucial SSD from Amazon, to replace the 256 GB Samsung + 2 TB HDD of my desktop. (primary SSD is an NVME Samsung, the 256 GB was an old Sata used as secondary). That 256 GB Samsung now lives in a new Qotom PC that runs XPC-NG and a Windows VM for my accountant.

I absolutely agree here - SSD is one of the best upgrades for an older computer - and pricing is coming down fast - 3D NAND tech does this.

On NewEGG - Samsung 860EVO 256GB is $76USD... and that's down 25 percent from what I paid for my 860EVO 3 months ago for a NUC build...

I've found for client usage - SSD's are more reliable than spinning disks, I've got daily drivers from 2011 that are still on the original SSD's - doesn't mean one can skip backups though, one should always have a back up plan.

@coxhaus - any thoughts about backing up that small business network now that the network and client workstations have been sorted?

 

[coxhaus]

I have not installed a server so no backup is needed. The client machines, I will not backup. They will just be re-installed. If we need storage then I will install a server which will have drive maps that will be backed up.

I have Windows 10 on a USB 3.0 flash stick. Windows 10 will fit on a 16 gig flash stick. I can install another workstation in less than 15 minutes. The flash stick that I have of Windows 10 has 1803 update incorporated into it. So there is not many updates.

The other nice thing with Windows 10 is Microsoft has a Windows 10 reset. You can use reset to wipe a user. If you google Windows 10 reset it will explain it. After the reset it is like a fresh install, all user passwords and save web stuff is wiped.

Coming up with an image scanner is my problem now.

With all these Intel i7 CPUs my core switch is running it's little fan a lot. We are moving some data across the internet.

Turns out Dell released a new BIOS marked urgent for the Dell 7010 PCs 2 days ago. I had to update the BIOS today on all the new machines. This seemed kind of odd to me on such an old machine. It is good to know they are still supporting the Dell 7010 machines.

 

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Turns out Dell released a new BIOS marked urgent for the Dell 7010 PCs 2 days ago. I had to update the BIOS today on all the new machines. This seemed kind of odd to me on such an old machine. It is good to know they are still supporting the Dell 7010 machines.

probably meltdown/spectre fixes - they've been rolling this across their products once things pass QA...

 

[sfx2000]

The other nice thing with Windows 10 is Microsoft has a Windows 10 reset. You can use reset to wipe a user. If you google Windows 10 reset it will explain it. After the reset it is like a fresh install, all user passwords and save web stuff is wiped.

Yes, that is a nice thing - if I recall, this was actually brought it on Win8 - who uses that one these days

 

[sfx2000]

I have not installed a server so no backup is needed. The client machines, I will not backup. They will just be re-installed. If we need storage then I will install a server which will have drive maps that will be backed up.

Don't need to back up the whole machine - just the user docs directory - check Acronis or others there...

 

[coxhaus]

I consider a client machine expendable. If we need user docs backed up we will use a server which will be backed up. I don't want to get involved with client machines other than replace them. Client machines can eat a lot of my time which I don't want to give. Right now only the previous owner's machine has anything worth backing up. I have not completely taken over that machine. I only keep it up to date for security fixes and network changes.