By Ero Gray - This is one post in a continuing series aimed at nonprofit organizations with limited access to IT staff. The advice and opinions here will tend to be most useful to small and startup nonprofits, which often need to make IT decisions and accomplish IT tasks despite not having qualified folks to help. It should be assumed that all suggestions here are my attempt to recommend the simplest/easiest/most effective options for most offices. Your office may be quite different (or it may not even be an office). Also, as I'll frequently note, IT staff are necessary for any organization to function for long.
Last week's entry, IT Without IT, Part 1: Choosing and Acquiring Computers, can be read here:
http://www.crenyc.org/_blog/News_and_Views/post/Choosing_and_Acquiring_Computers/
A lot of our clients wind up with donated computers that are agonizingly slow, or hang on to computers long after they've become antiques. It can be hard to know whether they're worth keeping or not. It's hard to generalize: smart and proactive IT staff can keep computers useful for a decade, while some machines are useless the moment their warranty expires. In general a five-year replacement plan is reasonable even for cash-strapped organizations, and if you've got a stack of computers with "Works with Windows 2000" stickers, you're probably not going to get much value out of them. But this, like so many other things, depends on your needs as an organization.
Evaluating PC hardware in detail is way beyond the scope of this article. One easy shortcut to guesstimating the usefulness of a computer, however, is its RAM. RAM, or memory, is the amount of quick-access brainpower available for calculations, and is the single statistic that will tell you the most about how fast a computer seems. In a Windows XP computer, you will want at a bare minimum 512MB of memory. That's a bare, unpleasant, takes-five-minutes-to-open-a-document, minimum. Twice that, or 1GB, is reasonable, and 2GB is usually great. In a Vista or Windows 7 computer you'll want 1GB at a bare minimum, and preferably 2GB. More is always better. Other components matter too: CPUs are what actually do the math, and it's good to have hard drive space for storage. But if you see a computer with 4GB of RAM, it'll probably get the job done regardless of what else is going on. (Don't get the RAM number confused with hard drive specs, which represent the amount of long-term data storage, and which tend to run in the hundreds of GB these days.
Printers are inexpensive these days but often you get what you pay for. Never buy inkjet printers; they're a scam designed to make you buy overpriced ink. For office use, you want laser printers. Personal printers can be as cheap as $125, especially if they won't see much use. However, at this price point you're mostly looking at made-to-break stuff; don't expect it to last unless you're willing to spend quite a bit more. Known name brands (HP, Samsung, IBM, Xerox, etc.) are usually reliable but not always: manufacturing trends mean pretty much everyone makes some really poor-quality stuff, and which model is which changes from year to year. There's no real shortcut to this other than reading reviews and/or asking for recommendations from folks with personal experience. Do, however, look up the price of toner before ordering a cheap printer: after a year the toner price can erase any savings.
One final note: when you get rid of computers, be aware that they're chock full of toxic chemicals and can't just be thrown away. Per Scholas (www.perscholas.org ) provides a great recycling service, and most communities and some stores have occasional recycling events, but if that doesn't work, sometimes just putting an ad in the free section of Craigslist can get the job done. Make sure to erase all data first (A good quick guide to erasing a hard drive properly can be found here: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/how-to-really-erase-a-hard-drive/129 )
Next week: IT Without IT, Part 3: Operating Systems
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