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For a PC to use at home, I agree 100%. If you're the kind of person that's likely to upgrade RAM or components I wouldn't recommend this for personal use. Thi

For a PC to use at home, I agree 100%. If you're the kind of person that's likely to upgrade RAM or components I wouldn't recommend this for personal use. This is geared toward enterprise use. Think, corporate IT department that needs to support dozens of these. They want a service contract and they'll probably replace the lot of them in five years. Having some weird proprietary components in there isn't a problem. After all, if they need help troubleshooting they'll have direct access to an engineer at Lenovo.

kbenson 7y ago
Exactly, and if they have enough volume, they can really nail down any lingering bugs or problems in the chipsets or firmware and it turns into a rock-solid system. Anything else and the manufacturer (Lenovo, Dell, HP) lose money on their support costs. If I was responsible for buying workstations for an office, I would definitely choose a standard business configuration over building it myself. If I expected those workstations to be running Linux, I would definitely attempt to buy one that was designed to work well with Linux for the same reasons. Note: This is also why some companies buy Dell/Lenovo/HP servers even though they cost more. Support. The components are all very well tested together, and any bug you encounter you can expect other people to have encountered and complained about as well, and hopefully should have a fix on the way (or already available through a firmware upgrade). I've also heard this is why Dell drives cost so much. They make sure to have stock around for you years later in case you need replacements, so you can replace with the exact same drive model.
MivLives 7y ago
I actually used to work in IT in a place that built their own systems at least for the engineers using CAD. Generally by the time anyone would want to upgrade anything in the system it was time for a new system anyway. It did save on initial costs of each machine, and made replacing individual parts easier. There were roughly 80-100 of these in service at anyone time, built in batches of ten refreshed normally when someone complained. I don't think this system would have kept scaling though, it took roughly 2 hours just to build assuming no issues. RMA for failed parts took awhile, and meant that more time spent fixing it. The hours were starting to add up when I left, and I can't imagine they continued.

kbenson 7y ago

Exactly, and if they have enough volume, they can really nail down any lingering bugs or problems in the chipsets or firmware and it turns into a rock-solid system. Anything else and the manufacturer (Lenovo, Dell, HP) lose money on their support costs. If I was responsible for buying workstations for an office, I would definitely choose a standard business configuration over building it myself. If I expected those workstations to be running Linux, I would definitely attempt to buy one that was designed to work well with Linux for the same reasons. Note: This is also why some companies buy Dell/Lenovo/HP servers even though they cost more. Support. The components are all very well tested together, and any bug you encounter you can expect other people to have encountered and complained about as well, and hopefully should have a fix on the way (or already available through a firmware upgrade). I've also heard this is why Dell drives cost so much. They make sure to have stock around for you years later in case you need replacements, so you can replace with the exact same drive model.

MivLives 7y ago

I actually used to work in IT in a place that built their own systems at least for the engineers using CAD. Generally by the time anyone would want to upgrade anything in the system it was time for a new system anyway. It did save on initial costs of each machine, and made replacing individual parts easier. There were roughly 80-100 of these in service at anyone time, built in batches of ten refreshed normally when someone complained. I don't think this system would have kept scaling though, it took roughly 2 hours just to build assuming no issues. RMA for failed parts took awhile, and meant that more time spent fixing it. The hours were starting to add up when I left, and I can't imagine they continued.