Sweat Those IT Assets - and go green into the bargain!

With money tight and energy costs rising, now's the perfect time to think out of the box and use imaginative ways of getting more return from your existing investments. Take those desktop PCs that are starting to age and will soon need replacing. It's going to cost money to scrap them and much more to replace them with the latest sleekest hardware. Not just thousands, but tens of thousands if you have to replace a substantial number. How come something so expensive doesn't last more than three or four years? After all cars nowadays come with five-year warranties and keep running a decade or more longer. You don't drag them off to landfill in their prime.

At Cutter we think it's a disgrace that PCs which, by most standards are almost new, are routinely scrapped to make way for expensive replacement hardware. More than a disgrace, in truth it's economic madness and simply unacceptable in times when there are much better things to spend the money on. There are easy ways to get much better value and we work hard with our customers to do that.

Old PCs — a ridiculous term for something only three or four years old — get thrown out mostly because they either don't have enough power to run an upgraded operating system or because their hard drives are reaching the point where they start to fail. The guts of the PC in fact are probably almost as good as new. The processor, memory, motherboard and other gubbins are fit for years and years more service. After the hard drive the next item likely to fail is the CPU fan, which costs a most a few pounds to replace and then the power supply which costs about the same.

Instead of throwing the PC out it makes much more sense to recycle it as part of a Cutter system. Strip out the hard drive, disconnect any other unused internal components and our software means it can be repurposed as an alternative desktop device with years more service life and a noticeably reduced power consumption. If you can get another five or ten years out of it without having to raid the capital budget, that's got to be good news.

How we get the most from your old PCs

A classic example is Uplands Middle School. Rather than waste scarce cash on replacing a suite of PCs that had reached the end of their life as a traditional desktop device, Uplands took the Cutter approach. The PCs were configured as Cutter thin clients, with the applications running on centrally managed servers. A combination of recycled PCs and new thin client devices was chosen, providing access to the same applications no matter which desktop device is used or where it is located.

The usual benefits of the Cutter approach have been realised. The overall system reliability is much higher than it used to be, the central management has substantially reduced the amount of time spent keeping desktop PCs going and there is no need to worry about shutting desktop computers down before turning them off. If a PC device does eventually fail it's completely generic and can be replaced with any spare in just a few minutes &mdash there is no need to install any software or configure it.

This isn't just a theoretical approach. It really works in practice and saves large amounts of capital expenditure. The PCs at Uplands were recycled this way in September 2006 and at the time of writing (July 2010) are still going strong.

This tactic is clearly becoming popular as word spreads. As well as Uplands, Cutter has several other clients doing exactly the same thing and with numerous enquiries coming in asking for details.

And another thing

And of course, once you have a Cutter system installed, it's much easier to give your staff remote access, deploy virtualised operating systems and reap the benefits of remote systems support and management.