Office PCs Upgrade

[king3pj]

I work at a small business and since I build my own PCs for gaming and know the most about computers of anyone in the office these kinds of questions usually fall to me.

We currently have 10 Dell Optiplex 790 workstations. These have an i5-2400, 4GB of RAM, and Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit. We also have a Dell Poweredge T310 server with a Xeon X3430, 8GB of RAM, and Windows Small Business Server 2012.

We are an accounting office and run Microsoft Office 365, multiple years of Quickbooks Pro Accountant software, and most importantly the Creative Solutions Accounting Suite from Thomson Reuters (Ultra Tax, Practice CS, Creative Solutions Accounting, Fixed Assets CS, File Cabinet CS)

All of our Quickbooks company files are stored on the server so anyone can access any company file no matter which PC they are working on. My understanding is that the Creative Solutions suite is actually running on the server itself and we are just accessing it from our individual workstations. The reason I think this is because every time we launch a program like Ultra Tax a progress bar pops up saying "preparing a local work area to improve network performance." Everything is connected by a wired network but we have an older Linksys 24 port switch that does not have gigabit support.

We came across an offer from Dell to upgrade to new machines for $500 each. These would have an i5-4460, 8GB of RAM, and Windows 10 professional. My boss wants to upgrade to these machines because we get pretty sluggish performance while multitasking. We usually have a minimum of Practice CS, Outlook 2013, Firefox, and either Quickbooks or Ultra Tax open at all times. We often have an extra program or two open depending on what we are working on.

I can see the 8GB of RAM helping with multitasking vs our current 4GB machines. My experience with gaming tells me that the i5-4460 wont be a drastic upgrade over the i5-2400 but I'm not sure if that changes when you are talking about work programs.

My theory is that the server is the reason our systems get bogged down, and not our individual PCs though. My gut tells me that a quad core Xeon at 2.4GHz with only 8GB of RAM isn't enough to run the software for our 10 PCs. I could throw more RAM in there but I think the CPU could still be holding us back.

The problem is that our server is a more recent upgrade than all the PCs and we spent a few thousand dollars between buying it and paying our IT guy to get everything set up properly. I know my boss isn't going to want to upgrade that and pay the IT guy again so soon. It may not seem like a huge investment but we are a small business and every dollar matters.

TLR is it worth it to replace our aging workstations if we are still going to be running everything from the same server? They are relatively old at this point but I'm worried the upgrade won't improve much.

 

[USAFRet]

1. More RAM in the server box

2. $500 each for all new machines sounds pretty good to me

3. Get a better switch

4. What are you doing for backups?

 

[king3pj]

1. More RAM in the server box

2. $500 each for all new machines sounds pretty good to me

3. Get a better switch

4. What are you doing for backups?

If some more RAM and a new switch along with new desktops for everyone will make our performance better we will be happy with the upgrade. You don't think the Xeon X3430 Quad Core 2.4GHz CPU will be a problem? I kind of assumed it would be and we would need an entire new server to fix our problems. That is really good news.

We have 2 external WD USB drives. We keep one connected to the server and the other goes home with my boss. The server backs up to this nightly and we rotate once per week. The IT guy also set up offsite backups over the internet and said that our server's internal storage is on more than one drive so if one failed we should still be able to recover. I don't know as much about that stuff though.

 

[Forever Oleg]

$500 for i5-4460 over i5-4440 and 4 more gigs? That's such a rip-off.

Also, believe it or not, but your main PC is less powerful than the individual workstations

Also, you paid the IT guy how much?! That's such a rip-off! (or I just never hired an IT guy so Idk the prices)

Because you run a lot of programs at the same time, it would be nice if you would put an additional 4GB stick of RAM (same exact you have) in each individual workstation so the total will be 8GB. You could also fork out for 16GB (2 sticks of 8GB, or 4 sticks by 4GB) because you really multi-task a lot by the looks of it.

The CPU in the main PC is actually less powerful than the i5-4440 you guys have in individual PCs but Idk if it should be much of a problem. Put more RAM in there (16GB).

 

[king3pj]

$500 for i5-4460 over i5-4440 and 4 more gigs? That's such a rip-off.

Also, believe it or not, but your main PC is less powerful than the individual workstations

Also, you paid the IT guy how much?! That's such a rip-off! (or I just never hired an IT guy so Idk the prices)

Because you run a lot of programs at the same time, it would be nice if you would put an additional 4GB stick of RAM (same exact you have) in each individual workstation so the total will be 8GB. You could also fork out for 16GB (2 sticks of 8GB, or 4 sticks by 4GB) because you really multi-task a lot by the looks of it.

The CPU in the main PC is actually less powerful than the i5-4440 you guys have in individual PCs but Idk if it should be much of a problem. Put more RAM in there (16GB).

$500 is for the entire PC. Also an i5-4440 was never part of the equation. Our current PCs are about 5 years old and have an i5-2400 and 4GB of RAM. We would be scrapping these and buying new machines, not upgrading them.

I build my own at home but since this is an office enviornment and we need 10 of them I am not going to do that. We want the warranty that comes from Dell and I'm not sure my boss would be comfortable with me building them myself even though I am confident in my ability to do so. Not only that but I don't want to be responsible if anything goes wrong.

Hiring an IT guy did cost a few thousand dollars but that included buying the server and paying him for his time. He set up network permissions and accounts for each of us, installed software and configured it to run properly on each machine over the network, set up offsite backup, and other things like that.

I am confident in my ability to build basic PCs and gaming machines but I know next to nothing about servers. An IT professional is necessary for our business to handle something like switching to a new server.

 

[USAFRet]

1. More RAM in the server box

2. $500 each for all new machines sounds pretty good to me

3. Get a better switch

4. What are you doing for backups?

If some more RAM and a new switch along with new desktops for everyone will make our performance better we will be happy with the upgrade. You don't think the Xeon X3430 Quad Core 2.4GHz CPU will be a problem? I kind of assumed it would be and we would need an entire new server to fix our problems. That is really good news.

We have 2 external WD USB drives. We keep one connected to the server and the other goes home with my boss. The server backs up to this nightly and we rotate once per week. The IT guy also set up offsite backups over the internet and said that our server's internal storage is on more than one drive so if one failed we should still be able to recover. I don't know as much about that stuff though.

Is this server just a file server, or do you run applications directly from it?
What else does it do?

 

[ComputerSecurityGuy]

$500 for that, plus the pain of reconfiguring all those machines? That's Dell for you. What you probably need is maybe 4GB of RAM for each machine and then a new server. The new server will be a pain, but make sure to get something with a server (2011-3) socket. That way you have something to upgrade to in another few years. The CPU on the existing machines is still solid. But if it's just a file server, it doesn't need an upgrade.

 

[Forever Oleg]

$500 for i5-4460 over i5-4440 and 4 more gigs? That's such a rip-off.

Also, believe it or not, but your main PC is less powerful than the individual workstations

Also, you paid the IT guy how much?! That's such a rip-off! (or I just never hired an IT guy so Idk the prices)

Because you run a lot of programs at the same time, it would be nice if you would put an additional 4GB stick of RAM (same exact you have) in each individual workstation so the total will be 8GB. You could also fork out for 16GB (2 sticks of 8GB, or 4 sticks by 4GB) because you really multi-task a lot by the looks of it.

The CPU in the main PC is actually less powerful than the i5-4440 you guys have in individual PCs but Idk if it should be much of a problem. Put more RAM in there (16GB).

$500 is for the entire PC. Also an i5-4440 was never part of the equation. Our current PCs are about 5 years old and have an i5-2400 and 4GB of RAM. We would be scrapping these and buying new machines, not upgrading them.

I build my own at home but since this is an office enviornment and we need 10 of them I am not going to do that. We want the warranty that comes from Dell and I'm not sure my boss would be comfortable with me building them myself even though I am confident in my ability to do so. Not only that but I don't want to be responsible if anything goes wrong.

Hiring an IT guy did cost a few thousand dollars but that included buying the server and paying him for his time. He set up network permissions and accounts for each of us, installed software and configured it to run properly on each machine over the network, set up offsite backup, and other things like that.

I am confident in my ability to build basic PCs and gaming machines but I know next to nothing about servers. An IT professional is necessary for our business to handle something like switching to a new server.

Sorry, misread i5-2400 for i5-4460.

Because of your needs and because you are a small business (as you said, every dollar counts), I would just pop in another stick of RAM into each PC and not worry about the $500 thing.

 

[king3pj]

1. More RAM in the server box

2. $500 each for all new machines sounds pretty good to me

3. Get a better switch

4. What are you doing for backups?

If some more RAM and a new switch along with new desktops for everyone will make our performance better we will be happy with the upgrade. You don't think the Xeon X3430 Quad Core 2.4GHz CPU will be a problem? I kind of assumed it would be and we would need an entire new server to fix our problems. That is really good news.

We have 2 external WD USB drives. We keep one connected to the server and the other goes home with my boss. The server backs up to this nightly and we rotate once per week. The IT guy also set up offsite backups over the internet and said that our server's internal storage is on more than one drive so if one failed we should still be able to recover. I don't know as much about that stuff though.

Is this server just a file server, or do you run applications directly from it?
What else does it do?

I think it's a bit of both. All of our files are on the server but it sounds like like the Creative Solutions Software Suite we use runs on the server itself. We do have the option to "improve performance by using local resources" setting selected on each workstation though.

We run several of the programs from that software suite on a daily basis on multiple computers at a time. That's why I thought the server may be the cause of performance issues we are having.

For the most part, these programs run fine once you have them open. Opening the programs is very slow though. Sometimes we get freezes for a few seconds when trying to do various things in those programs.

 

[ComputerSecurityGuy]

Especially since RAM is really cheap. Call it $20 a machine. And a new server if you really do have a mainframe/terminal sort of thing going with those applications.

 

[ComputerSecurityGuy]

That sounds like a switch/disk issue. Check to make sure the server hard drives are functioning then check the latency and bandwidth of the computers to the server. You may just need a new switch. Especially since a 24-port switch that doesn't support gigabit ethernet is probably rather old.

 

[king3pj]

That sounds like a switch/disk issue. Check to make sure the server hard drives are functioning then check the latency and bandwidth of the computers to the server. You may just need a new switch. Especially since a 24-port switch that doesn't support gigabit ethernet is probably rather old.

I know the drives are functioning because litterally every file we work on is stored on those drives. Even when programs are running on individual machines like Quickbooks and Microsoft Office all of the file save locations are on the server. Nothing is really stored on the workstations besides software installations.

I will work on testing bandwidth from my workstation to the server. Latency doesn't appear to be an issue. I just pinged our server's IP address from the command prompt on my workstation and all responses were less than 1ms with 0% packet loss.

 

[ComputerSecurityGuy]

Just saying, drives do start to fail before they do so catastrophically. Check for bad sectors, perhaps. But bandwidth, especially under load, could be it.

 

[USAFRet]

So...

1. Invest in a new gigabit switch.
2. Up the RAM on your server.
3. Try upping the RAM on one client machine. Minimal investment. See how it goes.

 

[USAFRet]

Hiring an IT guy did cost a few thousand dollars but that included buying the server and paying him for his time. He set up network permissions and accounts for each of us, installed software and configured it to run properly on each machine over the network, set up offsite backup, and other things like that.

Do you have all that documented? Just in case your IT guy gets hit by a bus.

 

[king3pj]

Hiring an IT guy did cost a few thousand dollars but that included buying the server and paying him for his time. He set up network permissions and accounts for each of us, installed software and configured it to run properly on each machine over the network, set up offsite backup, and other things like that.

Do you have all that documented? Just in case your IT guy gets hit by a bus.

My account and the business owner's accounts are set as administrator accounts on the server. I know how to do things like delete an old account when an employee leaves and set up a new one when we replace that employee. I have done that kind of thing several times but I only know how to do it because he showed me when he set it up. I didn't know how to do it before then.

There are some things I still have no clue about though. I know that a lot of our software relies on SQL support from the server. Now, do I know what that means or how to implement it if we got a new server? Absolutely not. I have the account info to access our offsite server backups but would I know how to get that backup restored in the event of drive failure on our server? Nope.

Our IT guy is not an employee of our business. We don't require a full time, in house IT guy so we use a guy who runs his own IT business. If we ever had to find a new IT guy for any reason we would obviously have to find someone who understands the SQL and backup restoration stuff but I assume that's something that someone in that kind of work can handle.

I have learned a lot but I still wouldn't know how to take a new server from scratch and get everything running the way it is now. Computers are a hobby of mine and I love learning about this stuff but I'm an accountant by trade.

 

[USAFRet]

You need to get ALL of that documented.

Where are your offsite backups?
What is the account username/password?
In case your main server actually dies, how to reconstitute that on a whole new box?
Has this ever been actually tested?

In the case of this guy taking a job in London, or getting hit by a bus....yes, you can hire someone new.
In which case it will take him several days to figure out what the original guy did.
With good documentation, maybe 1 day.
There may or may not have been some specific tweaks this guy did for your specific environment.

Having a sometime IT guy is no problem, and quite usual.
But you guys need to own 'how and why' he did things.

 

[Mr Kagouris]

Seeing as you're a small accounting business the software doesn't seem all that resource intensive. A better investment than upgrading the workstations entirely would be:

1) Upgrading your network
2) Upgrading the workstations with an SSD each if they don't already have one. It would vastly increase responsiveness making life easier for everyone. Also upgrade the RAM to 8GB per workstation. In total since you said you don't store anything on the workstations you'd need a 128GB SSD per station max plus 4GB of RAM (or 8GB if you wanna be sure you won't run into compatibility issues). Would cost max 175$ per station for the components. Now if you're within warranty I'd suggest getting Dell to do the upgrade for you, if not it'd be pretty simple to do it yourself.

As for the server, if it's mainly for storage I doubt it's having performance issues.

 

[king3pj]

You need to get ALL of that documented.

Where are your offsite backups?
What is the account username/password?
In case your main server actually dies, how to reconstitute that on a whole new box?
Has this ever been actually tested?

In the case of this guy taking a job in London, or getting hit by a bus....yes, you can hire someone new.
In which case it will take him several days to figure out what the original guy did.
With good documentation, maybe 1 day.
There may or may not have been some specific tweaks this guy did for your specific environment.

Having a sometime IT guy is no problem, and quite usual.
But you guys need to own 'how and why' he did things.

Yeah, that's something I need to look into. I do know where our backups are and the user name and password required to access them. The part I don't know how to do is take that backup and restore it to a fresh machine. I know that when we switched servers a couple years ago all our data was restored from a backup of our old machine but I wouldn't know how to do that myself.

As for specific tweaks and how everything is implemented so that our software runs properly off the server, I'm afraid I'm completely lost there. We get a new version of our software yearly and I take care of installing it so we don't have to pay the IT guy but it is able to take our settings from the previous year. I don't ever have to mess with any of the SQL stuff myself.

I will see if I can get a copy of all of his documentation next time he checks into the office. As for our upgrade path, my boss thinks it's time to get new workstations. We are going ahead with the plan to order 10 replacement Dell machines with i5-4460s and 8GB of RAM. Seeing as all our current machines are about 5 years old this probably isn't a bad decision.

I will look into bumping our server's RAM up to 16GB as well.

 

[Mr Kagouris]

You need to get ALL of that documented.

Where are your offsite backups?
What is the account username/password?
In case your main server actually dies, how to reconstitute that on a whole new box?
Has this ever been actually tested?

In the case of this guy taking a job in London, or getting hit by a bus....yes, you can hire someone new.
In which case it will take him several days to figure out what the original guy did.
With good documentation, maybe 1 day.
There may or may not have been some specific tweaks this guy did for your specific environment.

Having a sometime IT guy is no problem, and quite usual.
But you guys need to own 'how and why' he did things.

Yeah, that's something I need to look into. I do know where our backups are and the user name and password required to access them. The part I don't know how to do is take that backup and restore it to a fresh machine. I know that when we switched servers a couple years ago all our data was restored from a backup of our old machine but I wouldn't know how to do that myself.

As for specific tweaks and how everything is implemented so that our software runs properly off the server, I'm afraid I'm completely lost there. We get a new version of our software yearly and I take care of installing it so we don't have to pay the IT guy but it is able to take our settings from the previous year. I don't ever have to mess with any of the SQL stuff myself.

I will see if I can get a copy of all of his documentation next time he checks into the office. As for our upgrade path, my boss thinks it's time to get new workstations. We are going ahead with the plan to order 10 replacement Dell machines with i5-4460s and 8GB of RAM. Seeing as all our current machines are about 5 years old this probably isn't a bad decision.

I will look into bumping our server's RAM up to 16GB as well.

Might be a good idea to get a model with an included SSD if they have such a model available. Having all the software you use for accounting on a fast drive will make your life a lot easier, much more so than a better CPU.

 

[king3pj]

Definitely. I run my gaming PC at home off a SSD and my office PC runs off a HDD. I see how extreme the difference is on a daily basis. The ones we were planning on ordering do not include a SSD but I'll try to convince my boss into paying a bit more to get machines that do.

 

[Mr Kagouris]

Definitely. I run my gaming PC at home off a SSD and my office PC runs off a HDD. I see how extreme the difference is on a daily basis. The ones we were planning on ordering do not include a SSD but I'll try to convince my boss into paying a bit more to get machines that do.

Might as well convince him not to upgrade at all. Your current CPUs are more than fine, another 4 gigs of RAM and an SSD and those workstations will be flyin' so to speak. Make sure to highlight that it'd cost around 60% less.