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Replacement Costs

Computers Don't Last Forever

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When a school district has just installed dozens of brand-new multimedia computers, it's easy to forget that the day will come when they will need to be replaced. Although wiring, racks and electrical closets are presumed to have a life cycle of about 20 years, that's not the case for computers, servers and peripherals. They are expected to have a life cycle of between three and five years, depending on the equipment and the assumptions of the budget plan.

Thus it makes sense for a school system to purchase new computers on a five-year cycle and to replace them on the same cycle. Sometimes a district will decide to channel older machines to simpler uses, but that can ultimately lead to additional costs in the areas of support and maintenance.

The Denver school system, for instance, assumed that when it purchased a new computer, it would not automatically get rid of it when it was five years old; rather it assumed that 10 percent of the district's computers would be retired each year. However, when it calculated the costs associated with leasing computers, it assumed that all units would be rotated at the end of a five-year lease.

Unfortunately, most school districts' budgeting practices do not make it easy to set aside money for future purchases. "A school that receives a sum of discretionary money in one year is likely to lose any of the funds it has not expended by the end of the fiscal year," one school budgeting expert noted. "As a result, schools are often unable to make a large coordinated purchase of computers and associated equipment at one time. Moreover, they are prevented from saving money to make such a purchase to replace a computer lab once it has become obsolete."

Because many school districts may be unable to predict when they will have the financial resources available to replace a computer, many experts recommend that they should purchase computers with as much processing power and memory as they can afford. That way, the hardware will be better able to handle new or expanded software packages as they become available. Districts may also find that they will have to pay fees to dispose of computers when they can no longer be used.

TCO and a Lease-Purchase Decision

The Fairfax County, VA, school district, a large district in suburban Washington, D.C., recently evaluated Total Cost of Ownership when reviewing whether to lease new PCs or to purchase them.

With the budget that was currently available, the district calculated that it would take seven years to replace all of its computers, rather than the five-year time frame that was its goal. However, when it analyzed the costs involved with supporting its hardware, it concluded that leasing would help control other costs, such as support and training because the district would be able to standardize its hardware configuration much more quickly.

In the end, the district concluded that in this case, leasing was the more cost-effective option.

In framing its decision within the Total Cost of Ownership parameters, the district was following the recommendation of the Gartner Group that companies can achieve a larger benefit by controlling support costs rather than by solely minimizing hardware acquisition costs. Over the full life cycle of a computer, the Gartner Group projects, the cost of hardware represents only about 15 percent of total costs while the costs of support represent between 70 and 85 percent.

The Costs of Accepting Donations: One School's Experience

While donations of used computers can help school districts obtain needed equipment, schools should be aware that there may be unexpected costs involved.

Trevor P. Shaw, director of technology at St. Benedict's Prep School in Newark, NJ, says when his school accepted used computers, it would accept only 486/66 PCs and then take steps to make them compatible with the rest of the school's computers. That would mean spending $50 to $100 to upgrade the RAM to 16 megabytes, $100 for a 500 megabyte hard drive and another $50 to $65 to license an operating system and a suite of basic software applications. That, he said, added up to approximately $250 to $300 per machine, or $12,500 for just 50 computers.

"Even after these upgrades the machines run fairly slow compared to faster machines you might have in other labs," he says. "This causes students to get more impatient with the machines, which results in more tapping on the ENTER key or more mouse clicks, which in turn results in error messages."

"You also need to consider what these machines have been through before you got them. Are components on the verge of failing? Are connectors or ports damaged or loose? When these components are on the motherboard, the machine really is no longer worth fixing."

Shaw adds while some costs can be saved by using a less powerful, earlier version of the operating system and software package, "you will need to do a lot of redundant training. You will also have to support two different operating systems which deal with networking in completely different ways."

The moral of the story: "The additional effort and hidden costs should be carefully considered," he says, "when weighing whether or not old computers are better than no computers."

Computers in Schools, Sure. But What About Technical Support?

New York Times, Cybertimes
April 26, 2000
By REBECCA S. WEINER

www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/04/cyber/education/26education.html

Paul Reese, a 30-year veteran of New York City public schools, is supposed to be helping teachers in East Harlem's Community School District 4 to integrate technology into their daily lessons. Instead, he spends much of his time fixing software glitches and troubleshooting computer breakdowns.

"The reality is I do too much computer servicing," said Reese, a former fourth grade teacher who is now a staff developer for Project Smart, a city education technology initiative. "I went into a first grade class and the teacher and the paraprofessional said the computers weren't working. I probably spent two and a half hours fixing that. I was a technician for the afternoon."

While companies entering the information age consider computer support a standard cost of doing business, schools, whose budgets are less flexible, seem to be taking longer to reach that point. In the meantime, schools have been forced to make do, sometimes sharing one or two tech administrators for an entire district, and leaving a handful of tech-savvy teachers to handle computer crashes and finicky networks.