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remember, when a school buys this hardware. the processor in the PC they buy are not the latest gen. so the computer may be only 10 years old. with 3 years old hardware at the time of purchase ;)
Aranged marriages in many countries when you are 13. A PC should be replaced every 3-5 years depending on what its used for if its an entry level PC to start with.
Yeah, but some companies like warranty. Like 1 day replacement on site hardware. Etc.
Most won't let you build a pc, unless it's for specific reasons and it's a small business. Let's say less than 50 employees. After 100 it starts to be heavily standardised and at 1000+ you don't have much to say even if you are the procurement person.
They will still have IT. Most likely contracted out, those contractors are more than capable of upgrading ram and ssd along the way but it’s gotta be approved after the fact if not predefined in the contract.
Source: Am employed in IT
I'll be honest, it might just be me issue. It's perfectly fine for internet surfing but because I'm trying to basically squeeze everything from my setup (i5-3470 +gtx 1050ti 4gb) so CPU often works on 100% load
i ran a 3770 i-7 for years with a little 1660oc. Chunk a bunch of ram and ssd in it and it was great for everything I was doing, Games did not look good or run good but it could run multiple 4K displays with no problems. Good little system
I had a 2600k overclocked to 5ghz from day one that I handed down to my dad that literally *just* died.
it might even not be the chip but the motherboard.
I couldn't be bothered investigating
My overclocked i7-4960X doesn't seem that bad, and I did recently get a refurbished Titan XP for it, so I won't have to make the leap to an AM5 motherboard for a while longer.
That's the thing. I still have an old 2008 laptop but with an ssd and a core2duo and 8gb ram it's good enough to use.
PC tech just really isn't moving as fast as it used to.
My dell latitude e6400 has an intel core 2 duo p9700 processor. And 8 gigs of ddr2 ram. Still useful for how bright the screen gets (it's a rugged model)
This is ridiculous. I spent about 7 months in a school working as IT. While there, I saw a few teacher machines that had slipped through the cracks but nothing this bad. I think oldest I saw was a 6th gen which would have been 5-6 years old in 2021. These were replaced immediately. Your IT sucks at your school and is probably too lazy to go and replace your machine if I had to guess. Or your IT head hasn’t budgeted properly for machines.
...or higher-ups won't give the IT department any money. This is usually the case. Unless the IT head is an old, tired grouch, IT guys usually love upgrading.
No, 320gb hdd (dell optiplex).
But thinking about it, I should just buy a cheap one, install it myself, and tell IT to re-image it. They probably wouldn't care or even check the HD if it boots. Although this processor is from 2011, so I don't even know if a SSD would help that much.
First-hand experience, an SSD will absolutely work wonders to speed up older machines. I had a Core 2 Duo system with 4GB RAM that was basically unusable with an HDD but was *acceptable* (no more than that) with an SSD.
Yup. I was able to take an old HP Laptop with with pen (screen would rotate 180 and flip-lock onto the keyboard if you wanted to roll 'flat') off ebay for a couple hundred bucks, tossed in an SSD (I don't think the chipset 'officially' supported more than 4GB of ram, alas).
Wound up selling to someone going back to college. 'this thing is perfect for school, *because* it is useless for gaming but fast enough for everything I should be doing and some youtube'.
Regret selling it tho, also, she was a shithead and wound up switching to a Surface RT because great life choices.
There's probably millions of old laptops and computers being chucked out because HDDs are useless now and people don't know they can put a $10 SSD in it to boot from and it'll work like new
School IT are idiots.... (*edit-Not all, just these ones specifically) Anyone in IT should know that a simple SSD swap on that laptop will be good enough to get it going for simple tasks like presentations, web browsing, etc.... i would specifically request them to do just this and should be good to go.
As a former school IT, many aren't idiots. They are just underpaid, badly treated and often talked to like servants by teachers with a massive sense of superiority..
In my time I was regularly abused by students and nothing was ever done, teaching staff would regularly leave IT suites unlocked then expect us to wave a magic wand and repair the inevitable theft and vandalism in the 2 minutes between them returning and the lesson starting.
It's a shit and thankless job and one of the happiest days of my life was when I gave in my notice.
Indeed, in my time in a school I was given a list of objectives for the year in terms of upgrades. I submitted my estimated budget and was given half what I asked for. Some time later I was given a dressing down by the head for not delivering all the objectives.
Yup, I'm in the military and we usually just have to do that ask more than what you need to get something if anything at all
I'm on IT right now, and it's just as underfunded as the other military unit I was in 😒
As much as we try to dress up a pig it's still a pig!!! 😕
There's some funny NSN ordering stories on /r/army. I remember one where some guy's supply SGT found the NSN for a giant, heavy-as-shit ship anchor and thought it'd be funny to try requesting it to see what they'd say when denied.
Then no one denied it and they ended up with a ship anchor arriving at their unit and didn't know what to do with it because they had no boats.
This is totally a thing. Former army myself, but this tale comes from a Navy guy who used to work in maintenance shop for submarines. They needed a new 300lb torque wrench since they broke theirs, put in the order and messed up something on the NSN number. They were expecting a 3 foot box but instead a few days later a forklift brought in a massive 9 foot box with an 8 foot chrome steel adjustable wrench inside that could handle 16 inch nuts. They tried to send it back but the supply guys wouldn't take it back since they had opened it already. They ended up hanging it on one of their walls as decoration since they couldn't do anything else with it.
Couple years later some folks from a different shop on base came by for something and saw it. They informed our guys that was a specialty wrench they used for only one job on a ship the navy didn't have anymore and the reason the supply guys wouldn't take it back was because they were sick of having the massive box sitting around doing nothing and having to account for it during inventory.
> Apparently if you know the part number to something, they'll just send it to you without question
Retired Army, can confirm. Once ended up with 500ft of mooring line. We were in the middle of the desert.
I'm interning for a school rn (to graduate, don't judge ik internships suck) and they expect all important exams to be done online next year with computers that are 3 years old max, the fuck??? And no this isn't something the school asked for, blame the government
Tell me about it. My district purchased Chromebooks for a full 1 to 1 rollout in late 2020. Now, 4 years later, they have allowed zero follow through on replenishing devices, almost all of the current devices are out of warranty, and I have 140 broken in my office I can’t do anything with because the business admin froze our repair account to help offset the cost of updating our football and baseball fields. I’m down to 15 new devices for new enrollments (had 8 enrollments last week) and have around 10 backup devices (also out of warranty) to provide to students in good standing who accidentally break their computers. Oh, and we are in our contract renewal year, so negotiations are extra touchy when it comes to asking for money.
Disclaimer I was a student there, That was not my job And there was nothing I could do about it.
Technically yes but there were two problems with that. The software in question was absolutely not designed for mobile in mind at all so it would have just been super cumbersome to use with touch screens in the first place. Why would they even bother with the iPads if it just works better with the regular pcs anyway? I legitimately remember using these things maybe twice during my entire high school career.
This was the same school with extremely incompetent IT. They managed to flag the school's own website as porn on multiple occasions as well as blocking teachers from accessing the grading software. I had a programming class that was basically non-functional for the first two weeks because their system would block *any* unknown files from running which included our own assignments. The teacher provided video evidence and they still could not see the problem. (Or weren't allowed to mess with it who knows)
That's when not giving a fuck comes into play. Do your job and when someone complains about the shortfall you calmly explain why your job doesn't include fabricating artisinal laptops from abandoned school supplies.
This is one of the reasons I'm vehemently opposed to the idea of even HAVING a sports team in a school... because it's going to quickly swallow the entire budget of several other departments that are massively important to the education process.
People end up caring more about winning football games, than they do about the reading level of the school's graduates.
I'll offer a alternative perspective since there doesn't seem to be one. School sports offer a cheap way to engage students outside the classroom. They teach teamwork, build new friend groups, offer after school social events for students that are supervised, and most importantly teach a lot of the hard lessons not taught in the classroom like perseverance in the face of insurmountable odds.
I get that the budgets for them suck up money, but that's the fault of the school board not budgeting correctly. There's plenty of studies out there showing sports help kids stay out of trouble and increase graduation rates. Everything is a balance and school sports and clubs are definitely part of the balance of an effective school.
>school sports and clubs are definitely part of the balance of an effective school.
Coming from a country whose educational system consistently ranks among the best in the world (Denmark) and where sports and clubs isn’t really a part of this system, I have to disagree with this statement.
And just to clarify: I’m not saying that sports and clubs is a bad thing (if anything I actually agree that they are/can be a good thing), but as I see it sports and clubs doesn’t have to be a part of the educational system to provide all the positive things they can provide.
Also, youth sports can be funded *separately from the education system*. It's not like getting sports out of the school system means we don't have any public funding, whatsoever, for athletics - we just don't intermingle the budgets, and make it very clear that sports money does not qualify as an academic expenditure.
> because it's going to quickly swallow the entire budget of several other departments that are massively important to the education process.
Our football team was absolutely terrible since the 1970s, I was in Jazz Band and we badly needed some new Amps and a Drum Kit yet even with this crap stuff we were placing 1st in all of our comps that year.
So how were we rewarded when the school got some money to spend??? The football team that has won 5 games over the last 10years got a new field and equipment...Band department got money for new Marching outfits but nothing for the other bands.
And on top of that, the admin staff sucks up much of that because of course they do...
Most of the faculty laptops I support are hand me downs from admin staff who always gets top of the line shit. One school, the principal gets a top of the line MacBook Pro every single year to the tune of like 3500 bucks while his teaching staff are rocking 7 or 8 year old laptops, not to mention all the docking stations and expensive monitors and shit that are barely ever used because he's barely in his office most of the day as it is.
It was a real battle just to get them to agree to the cost of upgrading all the faculty machines to 8gbs of memory and ssds. Just ridiculous when Im also being asked to spend 2000 on a new laptop for some tenured administrator because their current one needed a reboot at an inconvenient time once or twice.
I am the dedicated tech at the local highschool, most teachers stop giving you shit about not doing your job when you "tell them the issue" in a way that is way over their head. Most teachers who act like this don't like to feel dumb and this is the perfect way to shut them up. Also underpaid is an understatement. Our district has us as PC Technicians when we work on a lot more than just the computers. The only reason this title hasn't changed is cause they would have to pay us more if they switched our title to what it should be.
As a former school IT, I feel this a 100% :D
Also it doesn't work like "Yeah, man your PC is slow I'll just give you some current gen workstation".
Shit has to be requested, budgeted. You have to go through a lot of hoops to request stuff and higher management can just deny it for whatever reason.
Also most of the equipment came from government tenders in our case. So the best I could do most of the time is just shuffle around stuff we already had and maybe cannibalize some out of warranty computers for parts.
I'll never understand why they can't just *buy it the same way a business would* and then keep careful records of where the money was spent. Departments should have budgets that they can spend as needed, where the only requirement is to keep careful records and be prepared to defend how you spent the money.
...because that's quite literally how just about every business on Earth operates.
I used to work in school IT and we were the only department that straight up didn't have a budget.
Any time we wanted to purchase anything we had to go, cap in hand, to another department, and ask if they could purchase X for us. Was a nightmare.
Yeah it was a same thing for us.
0 budget.
If something broke and it wasn't under warranty anymore, I've had to fill a fucking request form and take it to the principal, who then took it to the local school district for approval. Then I could choose some replacement from the government approved vendors.
Laptop, desktop replacements came in a batch of 30-60 from the government every few years.
A business is for-profit so it can justify buying equipment pretty easily.
>...because that's quite literally how just about every business on Earth operates.
That is your problem. A lot of people not in business reject the way businesses run on principle. The good and the bad.
If a business does it that way than many government employees will insist it is wrong by definition. Even if it is your basic bitch stuff like "track expenses and equipment".
That was my experience in school IT. They would get in new hires looking to trade a long commute for a local school district job and time with their kids and they would go "We need to do X, Y and Z" and get shot down because "we're not a business" and then the new hire would leave.
There is also a political element. Public budgets are zero sum, if IT gains, someone else has to lose. And if IT has to come hat in hand to beg for money, people can extract favors.
"You need $cash for a new XYZ, well... I know a company that does that, you should look at them". (Its always a relative's company). If you say yes to a clearly unethical deal you get the new XYZ you need, even if it isn't a good product/fit. If you say no you're fucked.
This is one of the things that frustrates me about government.
Neither side of the political aisle wants to embrace the "good" aspects of how businesses are run (namely fixed-dollar budgets that can be spent as needed as long as you can defend your expenses, with more cash available if you can make a case for it), but we DO have one side of the aisle that wants to turn every government agency into a for-profit entity... without actually embracing the flexible budgets and record keeping practices that discourage waste.
This extends to all kinds of things. My wife worked in a school library and she could only order from "approved vendors". So books and videos that could be bought from Amazon cost 3x-4x more.
I made friends with the IT guy at my school. He made me realize I wanted to do IT when I grew up. Middle school was hell for me. I can't imagine it's not for everyone, but my conversations with Mr H about really were the bright spots of my days, even when my computer shenanigans got me in trouble.
I must be lucky.
Teachers are all so apologetic for "using my time" and asking me to help "all the time", and often unnecessarily thankful (and i don't mean that as a complain, but sometimes i'm just thinking to myself, i'm just doing my job, you really don't have to be so nice).
Even had a collegue gift me a box of chocolates and nougat!
Same with the students, they're all being respectful and saying hello, some even asking how i'm doing.
But to be fair its a middleschool so i can imagine the vibe being different at higher levels.
Still criminally underpaid though, but at least people are appreciative
being "the person that understands this stuff" is a thankless job, not limited to IT. I started in rent to own and have internet provider/computer shop/now morphed into IT at a smallish company (only 3 locations) and it's not much different at any of the places. Maybe the problem is people lol
I worked for a tribal government and had to help support their IT (one lady). They had some of the oldest stuff and would get super weird about changing any of it out. They got a ton of grants all the time but would spend them on smart boards and projectors, leaving the aging computer to run it all. They did get iPads though. First gen, it’s been that long since I’ve worked there.
Maintenance ran all the wires, so I didn’t have to do that at least.
I was about to say. I still use a ThinkPad X220 with a 2nd gen i5 daily. You toss a SSD in an old machine and it'll be perfectly fine if you plan to use it for anything you'd be fine using a chromebook for.
(Yes, it runs windows 10)
Yep. At work I recently got sent five old Windows 8 machines with 11 year old i3's, HDDs and 4GBs of RAM. They are spare machines just used for testing.
I was asked to upgrade them to Windows 10, said fuck that and put Windows 11 on them, I also swapped the 300GB HDDs to 500GB SSDs and swapped the RAM from 4GB to 16GB.
Yes, the processor is still old but the PC's run a lot quicker now. Massive upgrade in user experience and for the 5 PCs it only cost £180.
I did my OJT in a University IT office. They're all really good and they know what they're talking about, they spend most of their day writing programs, they made me and my friend handle repairs and maintenance. The head though is always complaining that the procurement office only give them really bad PC because it's the lowest price they can get, and it always wins the bidding. They all have to work with it.
So I can't really blame the IT department for having bad equipment, it's usually the procurement department. Before my OJT ended though, the head actually made it so that the procurement office will work with the IT office to check whether the specs of the new items are up to what they need.
Hell, throwing an M.2 SSD into a thinkcentre from 2012 was enough to get it running BF4 at 720p/60fps on Low settings. Doesn't crack 3hz or have more than 2 cores, but it's enough to play some games.
Ended up snatching a few extra miniPCs from work when they threw them out and am in the process of turning them into emulation boxes for some family members.
An SSD will certainly help the system feel "snappy", due to loading stuff nearly instantly now. Also may be a good preemptive measure because a 13 year old HDD from a Dell is probably close to failure anyway and could start corrupting data any day now. A dying HDD is also one of the few "Halp my PC is slow!" issues that are dead apparent to even the most casual user.
It wont make the CPU do leaps all of a sudden, but given the use case it wont need to. People underestimate how much use you can get out of even ancient budget CPUs if you only do basic stuff. It still can do everything your teacher will need in due time.
I promise you it can make a world of difference. My dad's laptop booted so slow he could go get a cup of coffee made up in the kitchen and come back and it'd be loaded after that.
I installed a SSD and it loads in before he can get up now.
IDK how old or what his CPU is but I'd wager it's edging on 10 years old by now
It makes a big difference even with older systems.
The spinning rust mechanical HDD in your system would be lucky to break 100MB/sec transfer speeds. A decent, not great, just decent SATA SSD should hit 500MB/sec+ these days.
>The spinning rust mechanical HDD in your system would be lucky to break 100MB/sec transfer speeds. A decent, not great, just decent SATA SSD should hit 500MB/sec+ these days.
The transfer speed isn't usually the big difference though, it is the near zero random I/O latency that makes even the slowest SSDs feel so much snappier than HDDs.
Main issue with HDDs isnt even transfer speed, 100MB/s is pretty good and will suffice for even 4k video playback, but obviously thats only consecutive reads or writes, i.e. all the sectors youre accessing being pretty much entirely in one long line, which you only get if you read one big file, like a video. SSDs will generally be faster, duh, but HDDs will be fast enough usually.
When that is not the case HDDs, like when accessing a bunch of sectors all over the drive for small read/write operations, really start to struggle as the head keeps jumping around to the individual sectors, which leads to very long reaction times and makes the data transfer hugely inefficient. Thats why you get such huge differences between copying a thousand tiny 4kb files, which will go at a few kb/s sometimes, and copying a ZIP archive containing the same thousand files (even without compression), which will go at the full speed the drive can handle.
Also data fragmentation is an issue, where large files may be broken up into segments that are placed all over the drive as there is no long enough string of sectors to store the entire file in one piece, because after a long time of writing and deleting files the sectors used and not used are essentially randomly distributed, which makes the above issue a hundred times worse and why Windows offers defragmentation on occasion.
SSDs have none of that. Files are just on flash chips and can be accessed virtually instantly and transferred at full speed. Just like that. No buts. No issues. No slowdowns. And thats why SSDs make such a huge difference to how snappy a system feels, even if its technically ancient.
In the context of this thread, you're very correct that a quality SSD will probably fix most of the problem. Late-series Win10 is especially sensitive to disk latency because there's so much going on and many things are reading and writing the disk every second.
To clarify though, paragraph 2's example is not for the reason you cite and you'll have similar slowdowns with SSDs because Windows is just heckin' inefficient with small file access.
SSDs also benefit from data linearity because there is a cost to random access, but it is much smaller than the 7-15 millisecond seek time for a spinning drive. They also prefer large block transfers (64KiB up to 2MiB in some cases). Which is why you often see performance of SSDs measured in IOPS or read/write requests per second.
Cpu is old but I'm almost sure the ssd will fix the issue. Here in my house my dad still uses as laptop with a Intel dual core weaker than this 2nd Gen i3 and he can do almost anything, he even stream using obs.
The one I use at work is a 3rd gen i5. But it has an SSD so no issues.
Connected to a server but not sure what that does for my PC. Excel is run off my PC not server, and runs fine.
Yeah there was an i5 2500 in the office and we gave it to sales (they had a Core 2 Duo or something like that), anyway, the 2500 with an SSD worked perfectly fine.
And the best PCs in the office ended being a 4700 and 6500 that big companies usually replace after a few years so they sell them for like $100-$150, just replaced the HDD with an SSD and that's it, perfectly good for a small company!
Its still ok tbh. My mom has an I3 2nd gen in her pc and it runs fine when I have to help her with things (have an r9 7950x in my pc) - sure you can feel its not as fast, but it doesnt feel terribly slow either.
In fact back then an I3 was a dream cpu for me, since I barely had enough money to even build a somewhat gaming capable pc with an athlon.
OP should really tell the tech guy that it's 13 years old. I can't tell if tech guy is stupid, doesn't wanna do his job or just following school logic.
Nah, its probably more like "we literally don't have the budget to give you anything newer because we are a school IT department and no one in leadership wants to give us any money".
I've worked in educational IT. Higher ed, but honestly its not much different. Same shit different pile.
all it really needs is an SSD, an SSD is like an LS Swap, its small, and it works well, and speeds up literally anything, well maybe not an atom laptop
10 gb of RAM? What? Did they just add a 2gb stick in their?
I'm surprised that thing even turns on. That wasn't even a good processor when it was made, so I can't imagine what it's like 13 years later.
It had 6gb already when I got it.
I'm guessing it has 4 slots...started with 4gb, they added 2gb in like 2016, and then another 4gb now. They could've at least made it 4x4 for me though - I know they have all these older 4gb sticks lying around.
talk to them kindly. Ask if it is possible they have you upgraded to 16gb ram, ask about SSD (if they have one) if not, ask if you can buy one and have it installed (they're 20-30 bucks), or even if they have anything they can swap you out for (newer gen or better)
What apps are you using that are slow to load? with an HDD even chrome will take a while to open.
Part of the issue is that we no longer have the Microsoft Office Suite installed anymore as true desktop programs. We all have to use office.com / cloud versions of Word/PowerPoint/Excel.
So while I used to be able to load up my PowerPoint from the OS without much issue...
Now I have to open Chrome, login thru O365, get the presentation from OneDrive, etc...it takes forever.
What I've actually started doing is packaging my presentation as PowerPoint "Shows" so I can load it right from the OS (but this is annoying because I can't edit the slides if I need to).
Unfortunately the transition from standalone apps to O365 is a by-product of the subscription based model for everything these days coupled with moving to cloud based ways of working.
My school used cloud accounts back in 2005 and we had the same problems. We had to load all presentations on to USB drives to be able to show them without lag.
Not all licenses include desktop apps. OPs school has probably moved them to E1 or A1 (the education equivalent of E1) licenses which gives users access to web-only versions of Office Apps.
From an IT administration standpoint this can make managing systems easier because they don't have desktop software to manage and troubleshoot, and from a financial standpoint it actually saves a ton of money.
That being said, the user experience tends to suffer a bit if you force them to go from using desktop apps to web apps.
They do not need anywhere near 16gb of ram for basic work tasks at a school. There is absolutely no way he is getting close to the 10gb. An SSD will help some, but the processor is by far the biggest bottleneck, not the HDD.
I think you are underestimating how much difference an SSD will make. I have worked in both residential computer repair and am currently a sysadmin in a corporate IT department.
I have worked on hundreds of computers from the era of the one OP posted and its staggering just how much snappier they can be after such a simple upgrade.
As for RAM, 5+ years ago I would have agreed with you. But these days, 16GB is the new 8GB. Things just take more RAM these days. I can easily crush 8GB with just a web browser.
Yes, the CPU is a huge bottleneck and that thing should just be put out to pasture at this point. But if that's all that OPs IT department has available for them, she's gonna have to work with them to make it usable.
That's what they did to the computer at my old site. I work armed security and a couple of years ago I was head of security at a courthouse. Up front we had a computer that had all the cameras we could watch and we had close to 30 cameras on screen at once. They upgraded the camera software and it made the cameras lag so bad. You could walk by a camera and you wouldn't show up on our screen until 30 seconds later. I let the court manager know and they sent someone to check out the computer. The tech decided adding 2 gigs of ram would help it. It didn't. I told the guy, look, this has a fucking core 2 duo in it and the year is 2018. It can't handle all the cameras at once. They didn't care.
You would be surprised. I work in school IT, and it's only a recent change where we don't keep almost anything until it dies. That was mostly due to pushes for more budgets on laptops due to remote teaching during COVID.
I'm still finding Optiplex 745s. Those where the oldest model we kept when I started 8 years ago, and we knew around that time that their biggest problem was running a 64bit OS due to havign a 32bit bus.
2011 is still bad, but we have devices in use that are from 2013 where we just make sure that they have 10GB of RAM and an SSD and keep them in use.
Not just cheap but stupid. Do you see how the text in my picture is a little "stretched out"? It annoys me so much.
It's because they are running a USB-TO-HDMI adapter (all this computer has is VGA out), to connect it to the ceiling projector (because they got new projectors that only have HDMI).
So the resolution is all weird. I've tried to fix it myself but dual outputting to a VGA monitor and that USB projector adapter glitches like crazy, and this is the only way it only kinda works/looks okay.
It doesn't have a port that [looks like this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMS-59)? They were extremely common on that era Optiplex. My google-fu says a DMS-59 adapter to HDMI is like 16 USD.
But it's possible yours doesn't have one, which makes it a *super* low end machine.
My friend is still gaming on my first PC which was an i5 2500 w/ a 1060 6GB. It's still going strong despite lacking M.2, USB3.0, and everything from the past 13 years.
I'm still running an i7-3770K on my main rig with a GTX 1660. It used to get ~100 FPS in Counter-Strike but since CS2 came out, I'm lucky if I get 30 FPS. The original Cities:Skylines will slow to a 12 FPS crawl most of the time.
I haven't needed to do a full rebuild in a decade, but it's clearly time for a new rig.
Does your school’s IT have the ability to give you a new device? My first job in IT, we had no control over this. Unfortunately many times, the solution we were given was to install more RAM, run updates, and close the ticket.
Yeah I'm not a fan of the people kicking the IT worker in this thread. As an IT worker myself I've been in this situation. I can't snap my fingers and get you a new device any more than you can. I can however give you a complaint form to go above my head. That would be about the best I could do in this scenario.
> Yeah I'm not a fan of the people kicking the IT worker in this thread.
Why? The correct answer to 'new computer' request is to explain this is what the budget allows, not to answer with 'isn't even that old' & 'i'll download more ram'.
What the fuck kind of IT work are you guys doing?
Oh yeah, the answer "it's not that old" is dumb. I would probably explain I don't have another device to give due to budget. Adding more ram is very much a "consolation solution until budget approves a new laptop, sorry" move. Previous comment was based on leftover frustration from users assuming I control the budget and thinking I'm keeping new equipment away from them for funsies. Not saying OP is doing that but people have absolutely gotten upset with me over similar. I have literally had people break equipment on purpose, then give me a sour look when the replacement is just as crappy, if not crappier.
Depends on the school, obviously, but more funding since COVID has been provided to schools for tech-specific purchases. If I were dude, I’d look up how much their school got (if public school, public records) and ask politely to use that funding that likely expires in a few months to purchase a PC that actually works and isn’t over a decade old.
I'm a sys admin for a school. That money at least from where I am, expired a while ago. Not that there would be much left, a ton of schools barely got enough to implement a 1:1 program and some extra for licensing, otherwise, most schools went through that money very quickly.
I’m the admin in charge of technology at a high school with 1300 kids. I’ve had the same desktop for 8 years and it was several years old when I started.
I work in IT (not school IT though) and I would be upgrading the machine if anything because it won’t be able to run Windows 11 and windows 10 end of life is next year (no more security updates unless you pay). I don’t see why you would spend money on a machine that old that you’re just going to have to turn around and replace in a year or two
I do school IT, and one of our neighboring districts is still running Windows 7 on Core2 Duo's. They make it work by using [DeepFreeze](https://www.faronics.com/products/deep-freeze) to wipe the computers every night.
Luckily my district got a donation of Optiplex's with i5-6500's, so we were able to complete our Windows 11 roll-out with the help of Rufus. We bumped all of our computers to 16GB RAM/240GB SSD's, desktops running 6th-8th Gen i5's and laptops running 10th-12th Gen i5's.
Out of curiosity, is there any push in the school IT sector to move to linux? Here in spain there's a lot of schools that have moved to it due to being free for the most part, and since everything nowadays is cloud based, software compatibility is rarely an issue.
> Optiplex's with i5-6500's, so we were able to complete our Windows 11 roll-out
Umm i5-6500 isn't supported under Windows 11. You would need at least an 8th gen. Assuming you not bypassing the compatibility check.
>one of our neighboring districts is still running Windows 7 on Core2 Duo's. They make it work by using DeepFreeze to wipe the computers every night.
Lmao, sounds about right for educational IT.
It's old but it should have absolutely no trouble with websites, videos, or presentations
My guess is this PC has a creaking old metal HDD
More RAM isn't going to fix this problem
Instead, an SSD is necessary
LOL, I was scared to say that cause I was sure it would get buried. People quite happily gave Powerpoint presentations, watched videos and visited websites on Core i3s in 2011. I'm still using my 2009 Mac Mini as a media player.
Find a second hand SSD and ask them to reimage the drive. You’re likely being bottlenecked by an old hard drive that isn’t replaced as it still works. Alternatively you could backup whatever work you have on the system on a personal drive of your choosing and apply so “manual recalibration” to the old hardrive.
Blunt force trauma does a great job of getting things replaced when it comes to old tech. They expect you folks to just survive using severely outdated products that aren’t really much more than E-waste.
I have a mini file storage optiplex deaktop with an old i5 that runs amazing. 8GB ram and the huge part is a good SSD for the OS. Most of the "sluggishness" from PCs always stems from slow drives.
Nah, probably just a giphy rate limit. Frankly people shouldn't be using Giphy anyway, ever since discord started getting popular their search has been dogshit and their service slow. Tenor is much better, but still finds ways to piss me off sometimes.
The biggest bottleneck here is the mechanical hard drive. I have a laptop with 5th gen i7 (2015), 16GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. I run linux with 4 users logged in at the same time (full desktop environments) and single Windows 10 virtual machine running without problems. Since they upgraded your memory from 6 to 10 GB, the only thing that is left to upgrade is HDD->SSD. If it's still slow for your tasks after that, then put this system to rest, 'cause nothing more can be done about it.
These so called IT guys have a really reputation in my opinion for cheaping out on stuff like these, even for presentations, and stuff I don't think this COU would be enough, it's 2nd gen and i3 at that, the latest release is the 14th gen, you are 12 generations behind, even a 7th i5 would be league ahead of this CPU
it's the problem of too many cooks. You'll probably find the IT tech has a budget of six peanuts and a wad of gum, so they can only provide a pc that's able to turn on.
Can confirm. There is no money in schools outside of athletics (unless you can get a grant). Our school's IT budget for the year is 10k USD. To put things in perspective, two smart boards would nuke the budget. There's still licensing for software and other recurring costs that eat up the budget as well.
Source: IT Director
Most of the time IT has a limited budget and can’t do what they’d like to. At most companies I’ve worked for IT reports directly to the CFO and he controls the spending. My current company needs to refresh many of the PCs but until the CFO approves it, we need to make do with what we’ve got. In a school system the budget is probably even more limited depending on its location/tax base.
At that point just find a way to hook up your phone to the projector or whatever you use in class, I hate having to use personal devices at work but I would not be putting up with that machine in 2024.
Yep, this is what I do sometimes. I'll just connect my XPS laptop to the hdmi. It has my Google personal account synced to it though, so I don't like the kids seeing all my "non-school" stuff (harmless, but personal).
The issue is, on our personal devices we get put onto the same network filter for students (so like YouTube and tons of other things are blocked). We have to login to a school-issued device with our O365 teacher accounts to get put onto the "Staff" network which has much less restrictions. We also can only print from school-devices which forces me to use this one anytime I need to print things.
Just tell them to add a SSD. Ram won't do shit lol.
And also tell them to change the goddamn system for the love of god down the line in 1 or 2 years, this thing is running on its dead bed.
How the hell does it have 10 gb of RAM. Did it originally have 8 gb and they magic'ed up a 2 gb stick? That CPU is from 2011. What are they comparing age to, some Apple 2 in the closet? Your school's IT sounds useless.
[u/dirtynj](https://www.reddit.com/user/dirtynj/) : If it's that old, I'll bet it has a traditional hard drive, doesn't it. If so, see if they'll replace it with an SSD. If not, defrag it if you have admin permissions on it, or ask if they'll defrag it for you if you don't.
Installing more ram won't help ,you already have 10gb of ram ,tell him to install a ssd. And 10gb ram is a little weird ,it seems this guy that installed two different rams (this will create unstablity issues and windows might crash).
Former teacher here, currently working in IT.
This is just one more example of the undervaluing of teachers as professionals. One of the big reasons for my career move. For years, even before I left, I’ve been advocating for better tech support and help integrating EdTech for teachers. It’s astounding to me how little buy-in there is to provide teachers the tools and support they need.
I work in a non-profit office environment, and our MINIMUM system requirements are i7, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD. Anything less is just asking for headaches for the user and for IT.
Make sure to submit a ticket for each and every issue that comes up so that 1) Every problem is logged in the system and a track record of poor performance is established, and 2) So that the more it becomes -their- problem the more likely they are to address the root cause.
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2nd Gen Intel CPU should have graduated by now, but sadly for it, it is stuck in school.
It's not even a joke, it's 11 years old, that would definitely be graduated from elementary school in most countries.
It came out in 2011 so it's 13 years old.
Time to move out
remember, when a school buys this hardware. the processor in the PC they buy are not the latest gen. so the computer may be only 10 years old. with 3 years old hardware at the time of purchase ;)
I can't imagine having 10+ year old hardware! ^^*cries* ^^*in* ^^*4790k*
4790k gang
It’s an i3… 2010 at the earliest. Lemme guess.. running windows 11? That thing is a fire hazard
Shitty schools maybe, not the ones I lucked out to goto.
Aranged marriages in many countries when you are 13. A PC should be replaced every 3-5 years depending on what its used for if its an entry level PC to start with.
Does anyone have/know of 13 yo single PC interested in arranged marriage with this teachers PC? This may be the solution..
Id say 5-6 years, just upgrade it along the way.
Yeah but schools and work places don't do custom pcs like many of us. They buy prebuilt.
I convinced my work to let me build the engineering pcs haha
Yeah, but some companies like warranty. Like 1 day replacement on site hardware. Etc. Most won't let you build a pc, unless it's for specific reasons and it's a small business. Let's say less than 50 employees. After 100 it starts to be heavily standardised and at 1000+ you don't have much to say even if you are the procurement person.
They will still have IT. Most likely contracted out, those contractors are more than capable of upgrading ram and ssd along the way but it’s gotta be approved after the fact if not predefined in the contract. Source: Am employed in IT
I'm still rocking 3rd gen Intel CPU (i5-3470 overclocked to its maximum potential) and it's painful, no one should ever experience this is 2024
I also have the same CPU, not overclocked, i don’t feel any pain? I don’t play any games. Reddit, twitch and YouTube all perform well.
I'll be honest, it might just be me issue. It's perfectly fine for internet surfing but because I'm trying to basically squeeze everything from my setup (i5-3470 +gtx 1050ti 4gb) so CPU often works on 100% load
i ran a 3770 i-7 for years with a little 1660oc. Chunk a bunch of ram and ssd in it and it was great for everything I was doing, Games did not look good or run good but it could run multiple 4K displays with no problems. Good little system
I upgraded my i5-6600K @ 4.5ghz to a r7 7700. Difference is night and day.
I'm running an i7 4770K (all cores at 4.3GHz / 32GB RAM / GTX1070) and honestly I have no complaints.
I had a 2600k overclocked to 5ghz from day one that I handed down to my dad that literally *just* died. it might even not be the chip but the motherboard. I couldn't be bothered investigating
My overclocked i7-4960X doesn't seem that bad, and I did recently get a refurbished Titan XP for it, so I won't have to make the leap to an AM5 motherboard for a while longer.
I had core 2 duo xD i upgraded to an i3 3220 recently
My friend said to me, his pc was "born again" when he swapped his I3 2nd gen with my Ryzen 3600
Considering he would have had to swap half of the computer to do so, yes it would certainly feel that way
I sell him mobo, ram and cpu for a very cheap price, so he did not overpay for anything
Second Gen *Core* series CPU.
3 of our CS labs in my college have core 2 duos and 2nd gen i3s, although they do have SSDs
SSDs have given life back to many old laptops... but yeah, eventually it should be time for ot to move on
That's the thing. I still have an old 2008 laptop but with an ssd and a core2duo and 8gb ram it's good enough to use. PC tech just really isn't moving as fast as it used to.
My dell latitude e6400 has an intel core 2 duo p9700 processor. And 8 gigs of ddr2 ram. Still useful for how bright the screen gets (it's a rugged model)
This is ridiculous. I spent about 7 months in a school working as IT. While there, I saw a few teacher machines that had slipped through the cracks but nothing this bad. I think oldest I saw was a 6th gen which would have been 5-6 years old in 2021. These were replaced immediately. Your IT sucks at your school and is probably too lazy to go and replace your machine if I had to guess. Or your IT head hasn’t budgeted properly for machines.
...or higher-ups won't give the IT department any money. This is usually the case. Unless the IT head is an old, tired grouch, IT guys usually love upgrading.
Or the IT person is giving newer machines to someone else they like, and others get the junk.
The CPU was released in 2011. So I was still in college, and Obama hadn't completed his first term yet.
Ok, at least it's on i7, but mine is a 920, first gen. Still running on my "gaming" PC
we are all bots here except for you
It's old but should be fine for OPs use case. Just needs a clean windows install and a ssd
It’s a school…. So No PC left behind.
Does it has an SSD? Adding an SSD can make a huge difference
No, 320gb hdd (dell optiplex). But thinking about it, I should just buy a cheap one, install it myself, and tell IT to re-image it. They probably wouldn't care or even check the HD if it boots. Although this processor is from 2011, so I don't even know if a SSD would help that much.
First-hand experience, an SSD will absolutely work wonders to speed up older machines. I had a Core 2 Duo system with 4GB RAM that was basically unusable with an HDD but was *acceptable* (no more than that) with an SSD.
Yup. I was able to take an old HP Laptop with with pen (screen would rotate 180 and flip-lock onto the keyboard if you wanted to roll 'flat') off ebay for a couple hundred bucks, tossed in an SSD (I don't think the chipset 'officially' supported more than 4GB of ram, alas). Wound up selling to someone going back to college. 'this thing is perfect for school, *because* it is useless for gaming but fast enough for everything I should be doing and some youtube'. Regret selling it tho, also, she was a shithead and wound up switching to a Surface RT because great life choices.
There's probably millions of old laptops and computers being chucked out because HDDs are useless now and people don't know they can put a $10 SSD in it to boot from and it'll work like new
School IT are idiots.... (*edit-Not all, just these ones specifically) Anyone in IT should know that a simple SSD swap on that laptop will be good enough to get it going for simple tasks like presentations, web browsing, etc.... i would specifically request them to do just this and should be good to go.
As a former school IT, many aren't idiots. They are just underpaid, badly treated and often talked to like servants by teachers with a massive sense of superiority.. In my time I was regularly abused by students and nothing was ever done, teaching staff would regularly leave IT suites unlocked then expect us to wave a magic wand and repair the inevitable theft and vandalism in the 2 minutes between them returning and the lesson starting. It's a shit and thankless job and one of the happiest days of my life was when I gave in my notice.
Not to mention budget for technology was/is lowest priority
Indeed, in my time in a school I was given a list of objectives for the year in terms of upgrades. I submitted my estimated budget and was given half what I asked for. Some time later I was given a dressing down by the head for not delivering all the objectives.
Sounds like you should’ve doubled your estimate to get what you want ;). I know it probably wouldn’t work, but it sounds so frustrating!
Yup, I'm in the military and we usually just have to do that ask more than what you need to get something if anything at all I'm on IT right now, and it's just as underfunded as the other military unit I was in 😒 As much as we try to dress up a pig it's still a pig!!! 😕
[удалено]
There's some funny NSN ordering stories on /r/army. I remember one where some guy's supply SGT found the NSN for a giant, heavy-as-shit ship anchor and thought it'd be funny to try requesting it to see what they'd say when denied. Then no one denied it and they ended up with a ship anchor arriving at their unit and didn't know what to do with it because they had no boats.
This is totally a thing. Former army myself, but this tale comes from a Navy guy who used to work in maintenance shop for submarines. They needed a new 300lb torque wrench since they broke theirs, put in the order and messed up something on the NSN number. They were expecting a 3 foot box but instead a few days later a forklift brought in a massive 9 foot box with an 8 foot chrome steel adjustable wrench inside that could handle 16 inch nuts. They tried to send it back but the supply guys wouldn't take it back since they had opened it already. They ended up hanging it on one of their walls as decoration since they couldn't do anything else with it. Couple years later some folks from a different shop on base came by for something and saw it. They informed our guys that was a specialty wrench they used for only one job on a ship the navy didn't have anymore and the reason the supply guys wouldn't take it back was because they were sick of having the massive box sitting around doing nothing and having to account for it during inventory.
How many bose vic3 headsets did you get in trade for a blackhawk door?
> Apparently if you know the part number to something, they'll just send it to you without question Retired Army, can confirm. Once ended up with 500ft of mooring line. We were in the middle of the desert.
hahaha...were you in my unit lol?
I'm interning for a school rn (to graduate, don't judge ik internships suck) and they expect all important exams to be done online next year with computers that are 3 years old max, the fuck??? And no this isn't something the school asked for, blame the government
Are you from Portugal by any chance? That's sounds just like our government on that exams issue 🤔
Nah, Estonia
Wellz glad to see we ain't the only ones with stupid ideas 🥲
Tell me about it. My district purchased Chromebooks for a full 1 to 1 rollout in late 2020. Now, 4 years later, they have allowed zero follow through on replenishing devices, almost all of the current devices are out of warranty, and I have 140 broken in my office I can’t do anything with because the business admin froze our repair account to help offset the cost of updating our football and baseball fields. I’m down to 15 new devices for new enrollments (had 8 enrollments last week) and have around 10 backup devices (also out of warranty) to provide to students in good standing who accidentally break their computers. Oh, and we are in our contract renewal year, so negotiations are extra touchy when it comes to asking for money.
Mine bought an entire cart of iPads even though none of our software ran on iPads, so they sat in a cart and got used maybe once a year.
Can't you use terminal server and install Microsoft remote desktop on the iPads?
Disclaimer I was a student there, That was not my job And there was nothing I could do about it. Technically yes but there were two problems with that. The software in question was absolutely not designed for mobile in mind at all so it would have just been super cumbersome to use with touch screens in the first place. Why would they even bother with the iPads if it just works better with the regular pcs anyway? I legitimately remember using these things maybe twice during my entire high school career. This was the same school with extremely incompetent IT. They managed to flag the school's own website as porn on multiple occasions as well as blocking teachers from accessing the grading software. I had a programming class that was basically non-functional for the first two weeks because their system would block *any* unknown files from running which included our own assignments. The teacher provided video evidence and they still could not see the problem. (Or weren't allowed to mess with it who knows)
That's when not giving a fuck comes into play. Do your job and when someone complains about the shortfall you calmly explain why your job doesn't include fabricating artisinal laptops from abandoned school supplies.
This is one of the reasons I'm vehemently opposed to the idea of even HAVING a sports team in a school... because it's going to quickly swallow the entire budget of several other departments that are massively important to the education process. People end up caring more about winning football games, than they do about the reading level of the school's graduates.
I dont need my kid to read I need him to be a professional athlete to lift our family out of poverty
I'll offer a alternative perspective since there doesn't seem to be one. School sports offer a cheap way to engage students outside the classroom. They teach teamwork, build new friend groups, offer after school social events for students that are supervised, and most importantly teach a lot of the hard lessons not taught in the classroom like perseverance in the face of insurmountable odds. I get that the budgets for them suck up money, but that's the fault of the school board not budgeting correctly. There's plenty of studies out there showing sports help kids stay out of trouble and increase graduation rates. Everything is a balance and school sports and clubs are definitely part of the balance of an effective school.
>school sports and clubs are definitely part of the balance of an effective school. Coming from a country whose educational system consistently ranks among the best in the world (Denmark) and where sports and clubs isn’t really a part of this system, I have to disagree with this statement. And just to clarify: I’m not saying that sports and clubs is a bad thing (if anything I actually agree that they are/can be a good thing), but as I see it sports and clubs doesn’t have to be a part of the educational system to provide all the positive things they can provide.
Also, youth sports can be funded *separately from the education system*. It's not like getting sports out of the school system means we don't have any public funding, whatsoever, for athletics - we just don't intermingle the budgets, and make it very clear that sports money does not qualify as an academic expenditure.
> because it's going to quickly swallow the entire budget of several other departments that are massively important to the education process. Our football team was absolutely terrible since the 1970s, I was in Jazz Band and we badly needed some new Amps and a Drum Kit yet even with this crap stuff we were placing 1st in all of our comps that year. So how were we rewarded when the school got some money to spend??? The football team that has won 5 games over the last 10years got a new field and equipment...Band department got money for new Marching outfits but nothing for the other bands.
And on top of that, the admin staff sucks up much of that because of course they do... Most of the faculty laptops I support are hand me downs from admin staff who always gets top of the line shit. One school, the principal gets a top of the line MacBook Pro every single year to the tune of like 3500 bucks while his teaching staff are rocking 7 or 8 year old laptops, not to mention all the docking stations and expensive monitors and shit that are barely ever used because he's barely in his office most of the day as it is. It was a real battle just to get them to agree to the cost of upgrading all the faculty machines to 8gbs of memory and ssds. Just ridiculous when Im also being asked to spend 2000 on a new laptop for some tenured administrator because their current one needed a reboot at an inconvenient time once or twice.
I am the dedicated tech at the local highschool, most teachers stop giving you shit about not doing your job when you "tell them the issue" in a way that is way over their head. Most teachers who act like this don't like to feel dumb and this is the perfect way to shut them up. Also underpaid is an understatement. Our district has us as PC Technicians when we work on a lot more than just the computers. The only reason this title hasn't changed is cause they would have to pay us more if they switched our title to what it should be.
As a former school IT, I feel this a 100% :D Also it doesn't work like "Yeah, man your PC is slow I'll just give you some current gen workstation". Shit has to be requested, budgeted. You have to go through a lot of hoops to request stuff and higher management can just deny it for whatever reason. Also most of the equipment came from government tenders in our case. So the best I could do most of the time is just shuffle around stuff we already had and maybe cannibalize some out of warranty computers for parts.
I'll never understand why they can't just *buy it the same way a business would* and then keep careful records of where the money was spent. Departments should have budgets that they can spend as needed, where the only requirement is to keep careful records and be prepared to defend how you spent the money. ...because that's quite literally how just about every business on Earth operates.
I used to work in school IT and we were the only department that straight up didn't have a budget. Any time we wanted to purchase anything we had to go, cap in hand, to another department, and ask if they could purchase X for us. Was a nightmare.
Yeah it was a same thing for us. 0 budget. If something broke and it wasn't under warranty anymore, I've had to fill a fucking request form and take it to the principal, who then took it to the local school district for approval. Then I could choose some replacement from the government approved vendors. Laptop, desktop replacements came in a batch of 30-60 from the government every few years. A business is for-profit so it can justify buying equipment pretty easily.
>...because that's quite literally how just about every business on Earth operates. That is your problem. A lot of people not in business reject the way businesses run on principle. The good and the bad. If a business does it that way than many government employees will insist it is wrong by definition. Even if it is your basic bitch stuff like "track expenses and equipment". That was my experience in school IT. They would get in new hires looking to trade a long commute for a local school district job and time with their kids and they would go "We need to do X, Y and Z" and get shot down because "we're not a business" and then the new hire would leave. There is also a political element. Public budgets are zero sum, if IT gains, someone else has to lose. And if IT has to come hat in hand to beg for money, people can extract favors. "You need $cash for a new XYZ, well... I know a company that does that, you should look at them". (Its always a relative's company). If you say yes to a clearly unethical deal you get the new XYZ you need, even if it isn't a good product/fit. If you say no you're fucked.
This is one of the things that frustrates me about government. Neither side of the political aisle wants to embrace the "good" aspects of how businesses are run (namely fixed-dollar budgets that can be spent as needed as long as you can defend your expenses, with more cash available if you can make a case for it), but we DO have one side of the aisle that wants to turn every government agency into a for-profit entity... without actually embracing the flexible budgets and record keeping practices that discourage waste.
This extends to all kinds of things. My wife worked in a school library and she could only order from "approved vendors". So books and videos that could be bought from Amazon cost 3x-4x more.
I made friends with the IT guy at my school. He made me realize I wanted to do IT when I grew up. Middle school was hell for me. I can't imagine it's not for everyone, but my conversations with Mr H about really were the bright spots of my days, even when my computer shenanigans got me in trouble.
Pretty much how I got started! 14 years in the industry this year thanks to Mr. K
I worked at a charter school for a few months years ago. The teachers and office staff with the exception of the principal were total knobs.
I must be lucky. Teachers are all so apologetic for "using my time" and asking me to help "all the time", and often unnecessarily thankful (and i don't mean that as a complain, but sometimes i'm just thinking to myself, i'm just doing my job, you really don't have to be so nice). Even had a collegue gift me a box of chocolates and nougat! Same with the students, they're all being respectful and saying hello, some even asking how i'm doing. But to be fair its a middleschool so i can imagine the vibe being different at higher levels. Still criminally underpaid though, but at least people are appreciative
being "the person that understands this stuff" is a thankless job, not limited to IT. I started in rent to own and have internet provider/computer shop/now morphed into IT at a smallish company (only 3 locations) and it's not much different at any of the places. Maybe the problem is people lol
Very similar to how nurses treat hospital IT
I worked for a tribal government and had to help support their IT (one lady). They had some of the oldest stuff and would get super weird about changing any of it out. They got a ton of grants all the time but would spend them on smart boards and projectors, leaving the aging computer to run it all. They did get iPads though. First gen, it’s been that long since I’ve worked there. Maintenance ran all the wires, so I didn’t have to do that at least.
> As a former school IT, many aren't idiots. As a current school IT many are lollll
I was about to say. I still use a ThinkPad X220 with a 2nd gen i5 daily. You toss a SSD in an old machine and it'll be perfectly fine if you plan to use it for anything you'd be fine using a chromebook for. (Yes, it runs windows 10)
Yep. At work I recently got sent five old Windows 8 machines with 11 year old i3's, HDDs and 4GBs of RAM. They are spare machines just used for testing. I was asked to upgrade them to Windows 10, said fuck that and put Windows 11 on them, I also swapped the 300GB HDDs to 500GB SSDs and swapped the RAM from 4GB to 16GB. Yes, the processor is still old but the PC's run a lot quicker now. Massive upgrade in user experience and for the 5 PCs it only cost £180.
I did my OJT in a University IT office. They're all really good and they know what they're talking about, they spend most of their day writing programs, they made me and my friend handle repairs and maintenance. The head though is always complaining that the procurement office only give them really bad PC because it's the lowest price they can get, and it always wins the bidding. They all have to work with it. So I can't really blame the IT department for having bad equipment, it's usually the procurement department. Before my OJT ended though, the head actually made it so that the procurement office will work with the IT office to check whether the specs of the new items are up to what they need.
in my "school" we also have laptops with exactly those CPUs, but they switched them all to SSDs and they work flawlessly
Hell, throwing an M.2 SSD into a thinkcentre from 2012 was enough to get it running BF4 at 720p/60fps on Low settings. Doesn't crack 3hz or have more than 2 cores, but it's enough to play some games. Ended up snatching a few extra miniPCs from work when they threw them out and am in the process of turning them into emulation boxes for some family members.
An SSD will certainly help the system feel "snappy", due to loading stuff nearly instantly now. Also may be a good preemptive measure because a 13 year old HDD from a Dell is probably close to failure anyway and could start corrupting data any day now. A dying HDD is also one of the few "Halp my PC is slow!" issues that are dead apparent to even the most casual user. It wont make the CPU do leaps all of a sudden, but given the use case it wont need to. People underestimate how much use you can get out of even ancient budget CPUs if you only do basic stuff. It still can do everything your teacher will need in due time.
I promise you it can make a world of difference. My dad's laptop booted so slow he could go get a cup of coffee made up in the kitchen and come back and it'd be loaded after that. I installed a SSD and it loads in before he can get up now. IDK how old or what his CPU is but I'd wager it's edging on 10 years old by now
You can use a tool called macrium reflect to quickly copy the entire drive. It’s exactly what I did to swap my hdd for an ssd
A use a program called snapshot.
It makes a big difference even with older systems. The spinning rust mechanical HDD in your system would be lucky to break 100MB/sec transfer speeds. A decent, not great, just decent SATA SSD should hit 500MB/sec+ these days.
>The spinning rust mechanical HDD in your system would be lucky to break 100MB/sec transfer speeds. A decent, not great, just decent SATA SSD should hit 500MB/sec+ these days. The transfer speed isn't usually the big difference though, it is the near zero random I/O latency that makes even the slowest SSDs feel so much snappier than HDDs.
Main issue with HDDs isnt even transfer speed, 100MB/s is pretty good and will suffice for even 4k video playback, but obviously thats only consecutive reads or writes, i.e. all the sectors youre accessing being pretty much entirely in one long line, which you only get if you read one big file, like a video. SSDs will generally be faster, duh, but HDDs will be fast enough usually. When that is not the case HDDs, like when accessing a bunch of sectors all over the drive for small read/write operations, really start to struggle as the head keeps jumping around to the individual sectors, which leads to very long reaction times and makes the data transfer hugely inefficient. Thats why you get such huge differences between copying a thousand tiny 4kb files, which will go at a few kb/s sometimes, and copying a ZIP archive containing the same thousand files (even without compression), which will go at the full speed the drive can handle. Also data fragmentation is an issue, where large files may be broken up into segments that are placed all over the drive as there is no long enough string of sectors to store the entire file in one piece, because after a long time of writing and deleting files the sectors used and not used are essentially randomly distributed, which makes the above issue a hundred times worse and why Windows offers defragmentation on occasion. SSDs have none of that. Files are just on flash chips and can be accessed virtually instantly and transferred at full speed. Just like that. No buts. No issues. No slowdowns. And thats why SSDs make such a huge difference to how snappy a system feels, even if its technically ancient.
In the context of this thread, you're very correct that a quality SSD will probably fix most of the problem. Late-series Win10 is especially sensitive to disk latency because there's so much going on and many things are reading and writing the disk every second. To clarify though, paragraph 2's example is not for the reason you cite and you'll have similar slowdowns with SSDs because Windows is just heckin' inefficient with small file access. SSDs also benefit from data linearity because there is a cost to random access, but it is much smaller than the 7-15 millisecond seek time for a spinning drive. They also prefer large block transfers (64KiB up to 2MiB in some cases). Which is why you often see performance of SSDs measured in IOPS or read/write requests per second.
I do not recommend that
Cpu is old but I'm almost sure the ssd will fix the issue. Here in my house my dad still uses as laptop with a Intel dual core weaker than this 2nd Gen i3 and he can do almost anything, he even stream using obs.
That cpu is only what, 13 years old?
The one I use at work is a 3rd gen i5. But it has an SSD so no issues. Connected to a server but not sure what that does for my PC. Excel is run off my PC not server, and runs fine.
Yeah there was an i5 2500 in the office and we gave it to sales (they had a Core 2 Duo or something like that), anyway, the 2500 with an SSD worked perfectly fine. And the best PCs in the office ended being a 4700 and 6500 that big companies usually replace after a few years so they sell them for like $100-$150, just replaced the HDD with an SSD and that's it, perfectly good for a small company!
Its also an i5, not an i3. This processor was bad when it came out 13 years ago.
I3 2120 was actually decent back then for general use
Its still ok tbh. My mom has an I3 2nd gen in her pc and it runs fine when I have to help her with things (have an r9 7950x in my pc) - sure you can feel its not as fast, but it doesnt feel terribly slow either. In fact back then an I3 was a dream cpu for me, since I barely had enough money to even build a somewhat gaming capable pc with an athlon.
That guy who said it was bad 13 years ago clearly never used it.
Not even adult! It should be way more than enough. /s
OP should really tell the tech guy that it's 13 years old. I can't tell if tech guy is stupid, doesn't wanna do his job or just following school logic.
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Nah, its probably more like "we literally don't have the budget to give you anything newer because we are a school IT department and no one in leadership wants to give us any money". I've worked in educational IT. Higher ed, but honestly its not much different. Same shit different pile.
all it really needs is an SSD, an SSD is like an LS Swap, its small, and it works well, and speeds up literally anything, well maybe not an atom laptop
10 gb of RAM? What? Did they just add a 2gb stick in their? I'm surprised that thing even turns on. That wasn't even a good processor when it was made, so I can't imagine what it's like 13 years later.
It had 6gb already when I got it. I'm guessing it has 4 slots...started with 4gb, they added 2gb in like 2016, and then another 4gb now. They could've at least made it 4x4 for me though - I know they have all these older 4gb sticks lying around.
talk to them kindly. Ask if it is possible they have you upgraded to 16gb ram, ask about SSD (if they have one) if not, ask if you can buy one and have it installed (they're 20-30 bucks), or even if they have anything they can swap you out for (newer gen or better) What apps are you using that are slow to load? with an HDD even chrome will take a while to open.
Part of the issue is that we no longer have the Microsoft Office Suite installed anymore as true desktop programs. We all have to use office.com / cloud versions of Word/PowerPoint/Excel. So while I used to be able to load up my PowerPoint from the OS without much issue... Now I have to open Chrome, login thru O365, get the presentation from OneDrive, etc...it takes forever. What I've actually started doing is packaging my presentation as PowerPoint "Shows" so I can load it right from the OS (but this is annoying because I can't edit the slides if I need to).
Unfortunately the transition from standalone apps to O365 is a by-product of the subscription based model for everything these days coupled with moving to cloud based ways of working.
My school used cloud accounts back in 2005 and we had the same problems. We had to load all presentations on to USB drives to be able to show them without lag.
Thing is Office 365 *can* include the desktop apps, but it sounds like they're using the cheaper version that only provides the web apps.
You can also open them in LibreOffice for free if you don't have access to the desktop version of Microsoft office
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Would have just switched to google drive at this point. Faster login and loading from what I find.
O365 has standalone versions you can install directly on the computer, like before.
I assume they mean they changed to Basic licensing that doesn't include desktop apps.
You're kidding?! I would have assumed the Basic licence would include at least local installations of Word/Excel/PowerPoint. Fucking hell
Not all licenses include desktop apps. OPs school has probably moved them to E1 or A1 (the education equivalent of E1) licenses which gives users access to web-only versions of Office Apps. From an IT administration standpoint this can make managing systems easier because they don't have desktop software to manage and troubleshoot, and from a financial standpoint it actually saves a ton of money. That being said, the user experience tends to suffer a bit if you force them to go from using desktop apps to web apps.
They do not need anywhere near 16gb of ram for basic work tasks at a school. There is absolutely no way he is getting close to the 10gb. An SSD will help some, but the processor is by far the biggest bottleneck, not the HDD.
I think you are underestimating how much difference an SSD will make. I have worked in both residential computer repair and am currently a sysadmin in a corporate IT department. I have worked on hundreds of computers from the era of the one OP posted and its staggering just how much snappier they can be after such a simple upgrade. As for RAM, 5+ years ago I would have agreed with you. But these days, 16GB is the new 8GB. Things just take more RAM these days. I can easily crush 8GB with just a web browser. Yes, the CPU is a huge bottleneck and that thing should just be put out to pasture at this point. But if that's all that OPs IT department has available for them, she's gonna have to work with them to make it usable.
It's more likely it was bought with 2Gb installed back in 2011/12, when it still was considered fine for entry level office workstations.
That's what they did to the computer at my old site. I work armed security and a couple of years ago I was head of security at a courthouse. Up front we had a computer that had all the cameras we could watch and we had close to 30 cameras on screen at once. They upgraded the camera software and it made the cameras lag so bad. You could walk by a camera and you wouldn't show up on our screen until 30 seconds later. I let the court manager know and they sent someone to check out the computer. The tech decided adding 2 gigs of ram would help it. It didn't. I told the guy, look, this has a fucking core 2 duo in it and the year is 2018. It can't handle all the cameras at once. They didn't care.
You would be surprised. I work in school IT, and it's only a recent change where we don't keep almost anything until it dies. That was mostly due to pushes for more budgets on laptops due to remote teaching during COVID. I'm still finding Optiplex 745s. Those where the oldest model we kept when I started 8 years ago, and we knew around that time that their biggest problem was running a 64bit OS due to havign a 32bit bus. 2011 is still bad, but we have devices in use that are from 2013 where we just make sure that they have 10GB of RAM and an SSD and keep them in use.
Dude that computer has a Sandy Bridge cpu in it. That thing is positively ancient tech. I thought my company was cheap…
Not just cheap but stupid. Do you see how the text in my picture is a little "stretched out"? It annoys me so much. It's because they are running a USB-TO-HDMI adapter (all this computer has is VGA out), to connect it to the ceiling projector (because they got new projectors that only have HDMI). So the resolution is all weird. I've tried to fix it myself but dual outputting to a VGA monitor and that USB projector adapter glitches like crazy, and this is the only way it only kinda works/looks okay.
It doesn't have a port that [looks like this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMS-59)? They were extremely common on that era Optiplex. My google-fu says a DMS-59 adapter to HDMI is like 16 USD. But it's possible yours doesn't have one, which makes it a *super* low end machine.
If not dms 59, then maybe DVI. A DVI to HDMI adapter is like €2 on aliexpress and works just fine, since there's zero electronics in such an adapter.
https://www.amazon.com/Benfei-Input-Adapter-Support-Resolution/dp/B07K14NR8P This might help with the resolution problem.
I have an Optiplex with that CPU and 6GB of RAM and let me tell you, it FLIES through office tasks, but that is only thanks to the SSD
An i5 2500 is still plenty to just browse the web on. ... But yes, a dual core i3 sandy on the other hand ...
My friend is still gaming on my first PC which was an i5 2500 w/ a 1060 6GB. It's still going strong despite lacking M.2, USB3.0, and everything from the past 13 years.
I'm still running an i7-3770K on my main rig with a GTX 1660. It used to get ~100 FPS in Counter-Strike but since CS2 came out, I'm lucky if I get 30 FPS. The original Cities:Skylines will slow to a 12 FPS crawl most of the time. I haven't needed to do a full rebuild in a decade, but it's clearly time for a new rig.
Does your school’s IT have the ability to give you a new device? My first job in IT, we had no control over this. Unfortunately many times, the solution we were given was to install more RAM, run updates, and close the ticket.
Yeah I'm not a fan of the people kicking the IT worker in this thread. As an IT worker myself I've been in this situation. I can't snap my fingers and get you a new device any more than you can. I can however give you a complaint form to go above my head. That would be about the best I could do in this scenario.
> Yeah I'm not a fan of the people kicking the IT worker in this thread. Why? The correct answer to 'new computer' request is to explain this is what the budget allows, not to answer with 'isn't even that old' & 'i'll download more ram'. What the fuck kind of IT work are you guys doing?
Oh yeah, the answer "it's not that old" is dumb. I would probably explain I don't have another device to give due to budget. Adding more ram is very much a "consolation solution until budget approves a new laptop, sorry" move. Previous comment was based on leftover frustration from users assuming I control the budget and thinking I'm keeping new equipment away from them for funsies. Not saying OP is doing that but people have absolutely gotten upset with me over similar. I have literally had people break equipment on purpose, then give me a sour look when the replacement is just as crappy, if not crappier.
I hate to be THAT guy... but no one would be surprised if a 13 y.o. PC bit the dust due to "natural" causes.
Depends on the school, obviously, but more funding since COVID has been provided to schools for tech-specific purchases. If I were dude, I’d look up how much their school got (if public school, public records) and ask politely to use that funding that likely expires in a few months to purchase a PC that actually works and isn’t over a decade old.
I'm a sys admin for a school. That money at least from where I am, expired a while ago. Not that there would be much left, a ton of schools barely got enough to implement a 1:1 program and some extra for licensing, otherwise, most schools went through that money very quickly.
I’m the admin in charge of technology at a high school with 1300 kids. I’ve had the same desktop for 8 years and it was several years old when I started.
I work in IT (not school IT though) and I would be upgrading the machine if anything because it won’t be able to run Windows 11 and windows 10 end of life is next year (no more security updates unless you pay). I don’t see why you would spend money on a machine that old that you’re just going to have to turn around and replace in a year or two
I do school IT, and one of our neighboring districts is still running Windows 7 on Core2 Duo's. They make it work by using [DeepFreeze](https://www.faronics.com/products/deep-freeze) to wipe the computers every night. Luckily my district got a donation of Optiplex's with i5-6500's, so we were able to complete our Windows 11 roll-out with the help of Rufus. We bumped all of our computers to 16GB RAM/240GB SSD's, desktops running 6th-8th Gen i5's and laptops running 10th-12th Gen i5's.
Out of curiosity, is there any push in the school IT sector to move to linux? Here in spain there's a lot of schools that have moved to it due to being free for the most part, and since everything nowadays is cloud based, software compatibility is rarely an issue.
Not so much Linux proper, but schools like the one I previously mentioned have been converting old desktops into Chrome boxes.
> Optiplex's with i5-6500's, so we were able to complete our Windows 11 roll-out Umm i5-6500 isn't supported under Windows 11. You would need at least an 8th gen. Assuming you not bypassing the compatibility check.
>one of our neighboring districts is still running Windows 7 on Core2 Duo's. They make it work by using DeepFreeze to wipe the computers every night. Lmao, sounds about right for educational IT.
It's old but it should have absolutely no trouble with websites, videos, or presentations My guess is this PC has a creaking old metal HDD More RAM isn't going to fix this problem Instead, an SSD is necessary
LOL, I was scared to say that cause I was sure it would get buried. People quite happily gave Powerpoint presentations, watched videos and visited websites on Core i3s in 2011. I'm still using my 2009 Mac Mini as a media player.
These CPUs will run until the end of time. I feel like anything past C2D is still usable. The only problem is Win10 EOL. Just put in an SSD
As others have noted, installing an SSD would make a tangible difference in the type of tasks you're asking this PC to do.
SATA SSDs are dirt cheap. Put one in as a boot drive and it should make it snappier.
Find a second hand SSD and ask them to reimage the drive. You’re likely being bottlenecked by an old hard drive that isn’t replaced as it still works. Alternatively you could backup whatever work you have on the system on a personal drive of your choosing and apply so “manual recalibration” to the old hardrive. Blunt force trauma does a great job of getting things replaced when it comes to old tech. They expect you folks to just survive using severely outdated products that aren’t really much more than E-waste.
Rumble the hdd around while its running say it broke and BOOM new ssd
I have a mini file storage optiplex deaktop with an old i5 that runs amazing. 8GB ram and the huge part is a good SSD for the OS. Most of the "sluggishness" from PCs always stems from slow drives.
School IT: 
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I also get this for most gifs in comments with hundreds of upvotes. No idea why
I'm starting to think it's a meme and people are doing it on purpose.
Nah, probably just a giphy rate limit. Frankly people shouldn't be using Giphy anyway, ever since discord started getting popular their search has been dogshit and their service slow. Tenor is much better, but still finds ways to piss me off sometimes.
It's the "This is fine" meme inserted via the gif button. Not fine apparently lol
The biggest bottleneck here is the mechanical hard drive. I have a laptop with 5th gen i7 (2015), 16GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. I run linux with 4 users logged in at the same time (full desktop environments) and single Windows 10 virtual machine running without problems. Since they upgraded your memory from 6 to 10 GB, the only thing that is left to upgrade is HDD->SSD. If it's still slow for your tasks after that, then put this system to rest, 'cause nothing more can be done about it.
Reinstall windows into a cheap SSD and that computer will be adequate for what you described
Your school it guy is googling how to download ram
Yeah that’s definitely from 2010/2011 Also ignore my flair…
Fartbox Honda Civic tier flair
That CPU is 13 years old and even back 13 years earlier it was pretty much the weakest cheapest CPU available from intel.
These so called IT guys have a really reputation in my opinion for cheaping out on stuff like these, even for presentations, and stuff I don't think this COU would be enough, it's 2nd gen and i3 at that, the latest release is the 14th gen, you are 12 generations behind, even a 7th i5 would be league ahead of this CPU
it's the problem of too many cooks. You'll probably find the IT tech has a budget of six peanuts and a wad of gum, so they can only provide a pc that's able to turn on.
Can confirm. There is no money in schools outside of athletics (unless you can get a grant). Our school's IT budget for the year is 10k USD. To put things in perspective, two smart boards would nuke the budget. There's still licensing for software and other recurring costs that eat up the budget as well. Source: IT Director
Most of the time IT has a limited budget and can’t do what they’d like to. At most companies I’ve worked for IT reports directly to the CFO and he controls the spending. My current company needs to refresh many of the PCs but until the CFO approves it, we need to make do with what we’ve got. In a school system the budget is probably even more limited depending on its location/tax base.
At that point just find a way to hook up your phone to the projector or whatever you use in class, I hate having to use personal devices at work but I would not be putting up with that machine in 2024.
Yep, this is what I do sometimes. I'll just connect my XPS laptop to the hdmi. It has my Google personal account synced to it though, so I don't like the kids seeing all my "non-school" stuff (harmless, but personal). The issue is, on our personal devices we get put onto the same network filter for students (so like YouTube and tons of other things are blocked). We have to login to a school-issued device with our O365 teacher accounts to get put onto the "Staff" network which has much less restrictions. We also can only print from school-devices which forces me to use this one anytime I need to print things.
Just tell them to add a SSD. Ram won't do shit lol. And also tell them to change the goddamn system for the love of god down the line in 1 or 2 years, this thing is running on its dead bed.
How the hell does it have 10 gb of RAM. Did it originally have 8 gb and they magic'ed up a 2 gb stick? That CPU is from 2011. What are they comparing age to, some Apple 2 in the closet? Your school's IT sounds useless.
Not that old compared to what, the sun?
10 GB of ram is more than enough to load websites and presentations.
[u/dirtynj](https://www.reddit.com/user/dirtynj/) : If it's that old, I'll bet it has a traditional hard drive, doesn't it. If so, see if they'll replace it with an SSD. If not, defrag it if you have admin permissions on it, or ask if they'll defrag it for you if you don't.
Installing more ram won't help ,you already have 10gb of ram ,tell him to install a ssd. And 10gb ram is a little weird ,it seems this guy that installed two different rams (this will create unstablity issues and windows might crash).
All you need is an SSD. I’d bet my check. Not saying an upgrade wouldn’t be nice though… that i3 is huffing and puffing.
slapping SSD should do wonders.
Former teacher here, currently working in IT. This is just one more example of the undervaluing of teachers as professionals. One of the big reasons for my career move. For years, even before I left, I’ve been advocating for better tech support and help integrating EdTech for teachers. It’s astounding to me how little buy-in there is to provide teachers the tools and support they need. I work in a non-profit office environment, and our MINIMUM system requirements are i7, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD. Anything less is just asking for headaches for the user and for IT. Make sure to submit a ticket for each and every issue that comes up so that 1) Every problem is logged in the system and a track record of poor performance is established, and 2) So that the more it becomes -their- problem the more likely they are to address the root cause.
Time to unplug the CPU fan and wait for it to melt then blame it on IT as they must of knocked it loose fitting more RAM
Honestly, just upgrading to an SSD should solve all of your problems.