More ThinkPads than I ever want to see in my life...

[mr_mbuna]

Until I go back to college, I've taken on a contract job at a nearby IT firm that markets to the public sector. The contract I'm working on is to deploy 10,000 IBM ThinkPad R-Series notebooks to a public school system within a month. The schedule is very tight and the scale of the project is ludicrous. Is this the largest concentration of ThinkPad laptops outside of IBM/Levono factories?

I thought it was like Christmas when I received my one personal ThinkPad last year. I may have handled 500 units today - several hundred at least. Let's just say the magic has worn off. I could be handling apples, oranges, or ThinkPads.

I think we've processed our first thousand units within the last few days (still warming up) and only experienced one defective system and two defective HDDs. Pretty good quality.

I should get you guys a picture of the benches with 200 machines set up and the crate behind them with 500 more waiting to be unpacked...

[Toe]

Awesome, I like the large scale total/defective products.......very impressive.

Picture!!


-Toe

[pphilipko]

You don't know how lucky you are. You don't have to look at dells all day.

[bhtooefr]

Heh... deploying THREE Dell desktops without using any sort of imaging tools was a pain for me...

[Ground Loop]

With a count that extreme, you should have some genuinely useful failure rate information.

If you're not too burnt out, I hope you'll come back and let us know the finally tally and failure types you've seen in this project. Also any dramatic unit-to-unit differences (backlight brightness, keyboard feel, build fit&finish..) You have your hands full without taking notes, but I'm looking forward to what you find after all of them are deployed.

Good luck!

[AlphaKilo470]

Wow, if I had a job like yours, I'd probably never want to look at another computer again. I've always felt that having a non-IT related job really does help keep up my appreciation for modern computing.

[tehsoul]

i demand pictures

[thePCxp]

I helped my middle school setup a lot of ThinkPad's, (See my post "Helping out some ThinkPad's" in the "Pictures of your ThinkPad & desk setup" forum), and I thought that it was so cool!

[bhtooefr]

Yeah, but how many did you do? Those pics looked like between 20 and 40.

This guy has TEN THOUSAND to set up.

[thePCxp]

I can't remember but there were a lot (More than 20 and 40 and I have more pictures).

[bhtooefr]

I do know that the sysadmin at my high school had to set up 40 or 50 Dell Inspiron 1150s (think like between a low-end R and a low-end G series, but crappier). Without imaging - everything done by hand.

We're in a mixed environment, and even though we could maintain a few separate images (one Inspiron 1150 image, one Dimension L___cx/2100 image, one Dimension 4500 image, and one Optiplex GX170 image), they're too lazy to set up images... meaning that there are some three year old, spyware-infested installs of XP in there...

[gazingwa]

imaging is the only way to go... back when i did that stuf... i'd have ghost running non-stop on a large project (large being 20-30) yeah... nowhere near 10000. why bother doing them individually unless they all have different requirements

[doppelfish]

... deploy 10,000 IBM ThinkPad R-Series notebooks ...

Here's your way to success and eternal gratitude on the side of the thinkpads.com forum members:

1. Sneak in camera
2. Take pictures, post on website, post link on website in forum
3. Profit!

cheers,
-- fish

[BigWarpGuy]

4; gain a little sympathy too.

[MadeInJapan]

I agree with others here...imaging is the only way to go to set up these computers....(I use Ghost 7) but once they are setup, you'll want to right click on "my computer" and then hit "properties" and then the tab for "computer name" and sequentially change each name to correspond to location of where they're going to be in the school, etc. I've done this at my school already and it makes a big difference...also, if they are networked you don't want a bunch of computers with the same name, as it just doesn't work if you have that.

Good luck.

[thePCxp]

I did that when I was seting up the ThinkPad's.