STEVE CASSIDY
Steve buys lovely refurbished German PCs before helping to cleanse the rubbish from another friend’s not-at-all lovely refurbished machine
Steve buys lovely refurbished German PCs before helping to cleanse the rubbish from another friend’s not-at-all lovely refurbished machine.
My client was in a very common situation. It had become completely reliant on a software vendor that defines all its computing requirements because it produces a tightly defined line of business software suite that does everything said business needs. A couple of minor omissions aside, a single executable did everything, including presenting at point-of-sale, printing receipts, and spitting out stock and trading volume reports.
Quite a lot of the IT business works this way now. I was quite surprised to find that the software company hadn’t gone one step further and done some branded hardware, like those ruggedised touchscreen terminals you see in some pubs and restaurants. But no… standard Windows ruled their world so there was a bit of an opportunity for me to slip in, add some value and try not to get in the way of what seemed to me the interminable calls about the minutiae of working a transaction database for a hire business.
I confess, I rather lost track of the passage of time, despite the quirk that this business was, in effect, a pop-up shop with a duration of six months. A completely different brand and team popped up for the other half of the year, which meant that there was a biannual panic when the PCs were all taken out and replaced with someone else’s gear. I suspect this is where the trouble started.
This year – year eight of the relationship! – there were some sniffy emails going around. Someone had looked at the labels on the backs of the point-of-sale PCs, and realised that they were some 11 years old: how any business could work like that, they said, was a mystery and a sign of some very poor support decisions indeed. Where was the warranty paperwork and couldn’t they just buy something new for the next rollover of the seasons?
This chorus was added to by the software authors. Can’t be having obsolete kit, they said. Windows XP is long out of security support and Windows 7 has followed it recently. No business should be running on 11-year-old equipment. The risk of failure was just too high.
Now, there were some minor details that softened most of these blows. One was that while the machines were indeed from around 2009, their drives and operating systems were not. We had done SSD upgrades about a year into the Windows 10 lifecycle (after the software guys said they were ready to use Windows 10), choosing to do clean installs of everything on new, clean SSDs.
In fact, the software they were installing on our “new broom” machines was heavily dependent on large lumps of .NET support libraries that were many years behind the leading edge, living right on the border of compatibility limits with Windows 10 and (a decision that will make Jon, Davey and Paul all
wince at the very same instant) obliging us to run all the workstations using this software logged in as the machine administrator.
I had asked about this pretty titanic no-no several times before, and was told that it just was not a priority, because so many of the software company’s customers are one or two-man bands who barely run a server, never mind a domain controller. I put some of that down to a translation and comprehension gap, and tried not to think about it.
But never mind that security hole. The chorus of disapproval for the old PCs was unanimous, and certainly had a heavy element of “why didn’t you warn us?” embedded in the demands for something modern, fault-free but perfectly warranted, newer but cheap, from a reputable maker but not a rip-off. Just get absolutely everything right Steve, and none of your whining about the unpredictablity of Brexit, if you don’t mind.
Eventually, having talked to several of my usual sources, I realised that, actually, Brexit was a massive encumbrance to doing the deal with a UK supplier. I was expecting to be in Europe, on site with the client, some time in late October or early November. The visible deadlines for a potentially hard Brexit were, at the point of discussion, just exactly when I would need to leave the country and move through a few European nations in order to reach my client – carrying paperwork describing the status of the bootful of PCs in the car, in terms that absolutely nobody knew how to write down because they were entirely undefined.
So with the clients’ deadlines quickly approaching, pretty much a few days from the then-defined
Brexit day, my only way out of the dilemma was to find a PC supplier in Europe. I could pay them by PayPal, then drive over and inspect and collect my stack of PCs on my way to the customer. Britain’s loss, to be sure, but at least the customer wouldn’t know the difference.
In fact, he did know the difference, because these machines (from workstation4u.de) were loaded with a pristine and up-to-date install of Windows 10 Pro – in German. The refurbisher had also included the original 320GB hard disk, while installing a smallish but perfectly usable SSD, and had not burdened my setup process by loading any crapware into the setup image. For under €200 a machine, this was about as unmissable a deal as I could find.
Plus, bearing in mind the original preferences of the software supplier, I thought these machines stood a good chance of lasting every bit as long as their predecessors. I got over the original requirement (that the PCs had to run continuously at quite high altitude) by specifying Intel Core i3 CPUs, compensating for any perceived performance debt by doubling up the amount of system RAM. As I did all of this by email, two months in advance, there was no panic and no extra cost.
The great day of switchover arrived. We took out the old PCs, having backed up their various data directories and licence files. The new PCs went in and each one was installed with the software house’s copy of TeamViewer. Installation proceeded without observable fault, and we started plugging in the rich variety of USB devices that support the typical retail checkout these days. Barcode scanner, keyboard with card-swipe included, PDQ machine for contactless payments and so on. These are a little finicky because the software wants to keep track of where they’re connected and who’s got the onscreen focus for the various inputs. While it might sound like a good idea to use a barcode reader on a credit card, it’s not a popular notion with a queue of 20 customers in the shop.
A nine-day hiatus. Snow fell; I had time to visit a few European contacts and wander back to the UK before my phone rang. Okay, so it was a bit worse than that. Every possible method of communication lit up at once. The shop manager was at the end of his tether: he’s not an IT guy, how could we expect him to spend most of his pre-season setup time messing about with USB devices? He had had enough of staying on the phone while the software guys fiddled, trying to understand what was happening as one machine would run the card reader while another wouldn’t pass barcodes back – and each day it would be different machines! Really, he was going to be processing 3,000 customers on the big opening weekend, all with pencil and paper.
My heart skipped a few beats: weekend! And this was a Friday.
A few phone calls later, I had a handle on what was going on. The software guys – the ones who had demanded replacement of the old PCs in the first place – didn’t want to get on the train and visit the customer to work out the cause of the problem. They hadn’t specified the age of the replacement machines either, simply observing that the old machines (which had been near fa ultless in their long operational run) were old. They forgot that the various USB peripherals were also old: I don’t think anyone would criticise them for that because when you look at durability in IT you generally don’t expect a till-roll receipt printer to last seven years. Certainly not long
“For under €200 a machine, this was about as unmissable a deal as I could find”
enough for the PC that drives it to be made obsolete and then replaced by a two-year-old machine with a mix of USB port types, and a powermanagement approach so diligent that the resting sleep power draw was way down in single figures.
By asking for new PCs, the software company had unwittingly asked for green PCs, with intelligent USB ports and a smart UEFI BIOS that took a very suspicious view of the spread of gadgets that had, again, been doing perfectly well over many years of intense retail activity. Each time the smart new Core i3-based machines went to sleep, the device mappings of the USB connections that the software depended on to divide up inputs, outputs, scans, typing, credit cards and discount vouchers, were randomised, being re-interrogated as the PC came out of the deep powersaving sleep taken as default by Windows. The different statuses of USB 2 and 3 ports mattered, too, although everything you read about backwards compatibility says that they shouldn’t.
So this turned into about as bad a case of hoist by their own petard that you could imagine. The software guys had at least six weeks to ask me what I was buying. They could even have got on the train and visited the supplier, long before any of this was a problem, but no: because they have a supportoriented mindset, rather then a project-oriented outlook, they didn’t take any defensive measures, or wonder whether their offhand observation about the age of the hardware might have some unexpected results.
As you have no doubt already anticipated, we solved the problem by turning off all Windows 10’s power-saving features. I was not entirely happy with this as a bodge, but on the other hand my original choice of the generally unpopular
Core i3 meant that the machines were, collectively, drawing only as much power as a single one of the decadeold predecessors.
Talks are in progress, as they say, on a full set of modern, power-aware USB peripherals. It’s not as if the old ones owe any more time or money to the business. And somehow I doubt the software guys, who were so keen for the PCs to be upgraded, will be charging much for any adaption work required to make this new equipment work. Will they?
Caveat developer
Not all refurbishers are as well intended or indeed experienced in making decisions for their customers as my new friends from Nuremberg. The second half of this euro-trip was not meant to be exciting, but it got that way right at the very last minute, when I rashly agreed to take a look over a friend’s “new” machine that kept whinging about language files.
I know what you’re thinking: that will teach you to hobnob with ex-pats, Steve. Of course they have language-related problems! In this case, though, it wasn’t Esperanto but Java. The machine was certainly of a type I consider to be my home turf: a middle-aged small form factor Dell workstation. However, it had not updated for a while. A sure-fire sign of being rather unhappy. I start these investigations in the apps page of the Windows 10 settings widget, and out popped a nightmarish prima
facie candidate for the source of the problem: AdoptOpenJDK.
The owner was a nice retired lady. There’s no automatic bar to such a person being a Java developer, but it seemed improbable. As I scrolled further through the apps list, taking out the various forlorn bundled apps (News! Sport!), I kept on falling over various other developer type utilities: in particular, a blue screen analyser. These are the stock in trade of the kind of IT worker who loudly proclaims their contempt for Microsoft, while quietly profiting from selling their products and services. In this case, it looks as if the friendly computer guy sized up the customer, grabbed an unchecked, un-passworded machine off the shelf, gave it a spritz with some plastic cleaner, and handed it over.
I’m not sure who comes off worse here. The original owner probably sent the wrong machine off for sale or repair or whatever. The shop-owner hasn’t done his local reputation any favours (the buyer being the chair of the local expatriate association), and the new owner had to cook me a particularly fine dinner to strip out all the trash and leave her with an actual working machine.
If there’s a moral to this story, it’s that there’s no safe place for the uninformed. Buying a brand-new computer loads you down with vendor-installed nonsense; buying secondhand might get you rather nicer hardware, but it still comes with equivalent risks from sloppy business practices.
“If there’s a moral to this story, it’s that there’s no safe place for the uninformed”