From: Chris Robinson 

I'm not replacing the one's that are working fine.  I'm going to replace them as
they need replacing.  For example, we have some fairly new (a couple of
years old) PC's running Win98SE and Excel.  They function fine and so I'm
going to leave them as they are.  However, we also have some older PC's
(P133's or less) running Win95 that need replacing.  I don't want new PC's
as it's not worth it for the tasks they do.  Instead, I'll buy some
refurbished PIII machine for œ100/œ200.  These won't come with an OS or
software so I thought that rather than buy a copy of NT/2k (which is what
I'd go for over Win98) for œ200 or whatever the current cost is per
machine, I can grab a copy of RedHat instead. If I replace about 3 PC's
initially, I'm saving a good œ600 - maybe even more when you take the MS
Office licences into account.

I'm not one of these people who's ready to rip out MS stuff just for the sake of
getting Linux in.  At the moment at the site I work at, MS Software has
it's place but, potentially, so does Linux.  One of our sites use RedHat
and RSync for client backup so I may look into that for this site next
year.  Who knows, we have no upgrade path for our NT4 servers at the moment
so they might end up running Linux in the end?

Chris.

"Geo." wrote:

> why bother, obviously these dedicated function machines are already working
> so why would you fix what isn't broken? (you already own whatever it is they
> are running)
>
> Geo.
>
> "Chris Robinson" 
wrote in message
> news:3F167EE1.64BC93AD{at}NOSPAMtotalise.co.uk...
> > I've been concidering uses for Linux for the company I work for for
> > quite a while now.  Basically, we have some shop floor PC's that run a
> > spreadsheet off one of our servers.  That's all they do (they enter
> > results from tesing some products on the shop floor), so I've been
> > thinking of using Linux & OpenOffice instead for a while now.  I was
> > talking to my boss who thought it was a good idea and then to one of our
> > security guys who's pretty unix/ Linux savvy about which distro to use
> > etc and he was fine with the idea too.
> >
> > I'll need to run trails first (the main thing will to see if the
> > spreadsheet has any macros etc in that'll need re-doing), but it looks
> > promising.  This'll then account for around 10% of PC's onsite.  Once
> > it's in and running, who knows - it could pave the way for Linux
> > elsewhere.
> >
> > Chris.
> >

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