>PCNut!?!?!?!
>
>Aren't you the guy that was promoting national brand name systems a few months ago??
>

I still do in a business environment; I buy my own stuff from Humphrey because I know exactly what I want, handle my own tech support, and he builds systems to my exact specifications. I doubt most busiensses have the necessary resources or expertise to do that.

For the company I work for (Weatherhill), and for the vast majority of our clients, especially the ones dealing with hundreds or thousands of systems annually, I still advocate national-branded systems.

OTOH, I know exactly what I need for the network I use here at home where I devleop; at the moment, that's an NT Server (SM P6DGS, 2x400MHz PII, 256MB of ECC memory, ARO1130CA controlling 5 x CP2107 RAID5 and 2xXP39100 RAID1, NT Server Enterprise, 3C905B, Matrox G200, random IDE CD-ROM), 2 NT Workstations (an SM P6DLS, 2x333MHz PII and an SM P6DGU, 1x400MHz PII with 128MB each and an assortment of SCSI drives) and a Win98 box (Asus P2B-S, 1xPIII/450; it's a system I got in to review and decided to buy). There are no compromise components in any of the systems, and I troubleshoot my own hardware, with spares either on-hand or available in less than 72hrs. None of the systems can't be done without for a period of time, and if something breaks, it's my own damned fault. I know how important backup is, and backup everything at least every other day to DAT tape, with WIP archived out several times a day to a Jaz cartridge.

There's obviously a huge difference in what applies to a hobbyist (me) with significant technical background, not in a mission-critical environment, and what I'd put into a business environment, where downtime = lost money. When I don't want to be on-call 24x7, I need a system that can be supported by an organization that can guarentee 4 hour turnaround, and always has spares. While I might be able to do that for Weatherhill, with 2 sites, if I never took any time off and answered the phone rain or shine, I can't do that for a few thousand systems spread over hundreds of sites. HP can; so can Compaq, or IBM, and the large mail-order houses like Dell and Gateway, who contract out their service and preposition spares for their service contracts with short turnaround requirements.

There's also a huge difference in what I know about the innards of these beasts. I know better than most what specific hardware can and can't handle, and I can spend a great deal of time on researching component interaction when I need to. I don't throw up my hands and say "My computer is busted" when I get operating system errors; if I get curious about things, I can throw up a number of system-level debugging and troubleshooting tools. It isn't economically feasible for a large corporation to track a large number of different configurations, so a standardized vendor and hardware lineup, and the availability of a service organization that can be on-site quickly and deal with problems effectively (to be honest, this often means having a box to drop in place and take the troubled hardware back to the shop, not under the eyes of the customer or under pressure to get it fixed quickly.)

A small shop can't do this. A small shop doesn't offer 24 hour support, and normally has a relatively small radius that they can support effectively. With the margins on most hardware now being low, and the penalty for holding inventory high, it's exceedingly unlikely that a business can get the level of support I'd want if my day-to-day existence depended on my automation solution being up and running. A small shop doesn't offer a level of comfort if the principal support mechanism for the shop is laid up with the flu or on vacation.

A small (or in many cases, large) business doesn't have the in-house knowledge to select the right components and troubleshoot the problem if they guess wrong about hardware compatibility. It's tough enough keeping their operating system and application software up to date. Having toll-free support 24x7 when the user doesn't know how to switch out of overstrike mode makes for a much less harried existence for the technical staff (I've gotten called at 3AM by our Director of Marketing, who found herself having to update a document before a sales meeting, nd not having her office assistant available to do it for her. I'd have been much less grouchy if she knew she could call Gateway's tech support number. I learned my lesson - now, she can!)

Any business that can afford to have an Ed clone at each site (or maybe two) can afford to 'roll their own' if they're willing to stock spares, or has a local vendor who does, and can respond within their business-dictated response time requirements. Aside from the hardware costs, the technical staff won't be cheap.