Is It Time To Upgrade Your PCs?Is It Time To Upgrade Your PCs?

Another technology that's spurring PC buying is wireless. By eliminating the need to rewire a building, wireless networking in the past year halved the cost of implementing 6,400 IBM NetVista A30p and A22p desktop PCs for Boys & Girls Clubs of America. In one of IBM's largest Wi-Fi deployments, more than 600 Boys & Girls Clubs are using Pentium 4-based desktop PCs that connect more than 200,000 children and volunteers to the Internet via wireless access points.

The organization is paying for them in part through a $100 million grant that Microsoft gave it two years ago. About $88 million is being used for training and software, including Windows XP and Office XP. Boys & Girls Clubs will use the rest to create a curriculum and hire staff for centers nationwide.

The new PCs are a step toward creating a consistent hardware and software standard across Boys & Girls Clubs' 25,000 PCs nationwide, says Bill Regehr, a senior VP of IT who worked at IBM for 30 years before joining the Boys & Girls Clubs in September 2001. With no standardization, it's very difficult to deploy an app for a specific task. "I have no confidence that everyone could support that application," he says.

Being able to implement an important app throughout an enterprise is a major reason PC purchases are usually part of an overall IT strategy. And once a decision is made to upgrade PCs, companies expect to keep them for a while.

"We don't intend to do a major upgrade program like this again," BMO's Erschen says. "Our goal has been to replace the hardware and software all at once and then keep it business as usual."

Illustration by Image Bank