Time is money – How much are you wasting?

A recent story from a rental client got us thinking about how much time is wasted in the world waiting for a computer.

Many of our custom built computers end up on rental to animation studios. These animation companies will rent perhaps a few, or 10’s of computers for undertaking rendering work. One of our animation clients undertook long term rental of a number of our dual, dual core Workstations (Click here for full spec). After he had received these we got an E-Mail back from them with the following comment – “Our previous Workstations were taking 45 minutes to render each frame, your new Workstation can now do the same work in 9 minutes – a tremendous saving in time”

Of course we were pleased that a customer was delighted with our products and that his rendering times had reduced by a fifth, but this got us wondering. Whilst this is an extreme example how many times when carrying our work on a computer do you have to sit and wait for it to do the “number crunching”? In particular in the CAD graphics and Animation environment, but anywhere that intensive processing is required.

As an example if you spend just 10 minutes a day waiting for your PC that equates to a massive 40 hours a year in “wasted” time (48 week working year). That’s an extra week’s holiday for your staff! Turning this into money, if your employee is on £26K a year that’s a £500.00 bonus you have just given them for watching there PC work.

Where does Rent IT come into this? Well if instead of purchasing your PC and then having to get the regulation 3 years out of them you undertake 12 monthly rental you have the ability to upgrade you PC’s every 12 months and avoid the wasted time and money. Just based on the above, if you assume that in year 1 no time is lost, year 2 it is 5 minutes a day and year 3 is the ten minutes a day then over the normal 3 year life of a purchased PC it may well have cost you £750.00! What price now for Computer rental? And this does not even take into account what your employee could have been doing to earn money for the company in that week and a half of wasted time.

If you wish to discuss how computer rental can help increase productivity and save money in your company then give us a call at Rent IT.

Beware – New Apple Macbook pro updates.

Apple is normally excellent with the software and OS updates through their website – download, install and reboot. Last week we received some new 17” macbook pro 2.4GHz laptops and with 2 to be despatch on rental in the afternoon the engineers carried out standard web updates on them. Upon reboot both failed. Only showing the Grey Apple start screen with the spinning icon. Re reboot did not clear the problem – neither did resetting all the (x)RAM’s. Oops – 2 faulty rental Macbook pro latops, and the couriers due to arrive to collect he machines.

The engineers attempted booting and reloading from the supplied OS discs, sometimes hanging but eventually both Macbook pros were re loaded and despatched without updates.

Upon return from rental a week later both Apple Macbook pros were connected to the internet and updated with the view that possibly we had a glitch on the ADSL line which corrupted the update previously, or if Apple had released an update not tested on these new laptops, they would have found the problem and fixed the bug(s). No chance. Both rental Macbook pros failed again on reboot! Will keep you posted on any developments

Apple Airport Extreme - Sorry all flights cancelled!

As we rent out a range of Apple Mac products we naturally have the latest Apple Mac Pro units available for our customers. For our rental customers we always look to provide them exactly the Apple Mac Pro they require wherever possible.

Thus last week we found ourselves installing an Airport Extreme & Bluetooth module in one of our machines for a customer. It was difficult enough getting these modules as Apple see them as a “dealer fit” however having applied a bit of arm twisting on our Apple Dealer (after all we spend enough with him!) he coughed up the Airport Extreme & Bluetooth module for our Apple Mac Pro.

So once installed off our Apple Mac goes to the customer and then today we get a call – “it doesn’t work, the Airport card keeps dropping out” Oh **** we say and start to look for the engineer who installed it to give him a good talking too. Having denied any guilt and having had tested it, admittedly not for an extensive period but enough to prove it was communicating, we decided to do some searching. What do we find – well lots of posts on various forums all complaining about the failures of Airport Extreme cards and Mac Pros

Of course our customer needs a solution and so its in the post with an external USB wireless module and all will be well again.
What’s the moral here? Just because a company as large as Apple sells you a product that they have had years of practise getting right it doesn’t mean they can’t screw it up, and secondly, I must remember to give my Apple dealer a good talking to the next time I wave an order for a dozen Mac Pro’s in front of him and ask what discount I am getting for this grief!

Welcome to the Rent IT team Blog.

We have decided to start this so that you, our rental customers, can get some insight into the trials and tribulations of being an IT rental company. Our Rent IT team will have access to this blog and can put up there thoughts and stories whether directly related to our computer rental activities or not.
Apart from the “company gossip” amusing stories and “I just want to let off steam” we will also throw in a few bits of useful information about computer rental and the products and services we
offer. Who knows we might even attract some new customers!

So please bear with us while we get to grips with this “new” technology and hopefully over the coming weeks and months we can bring you some amusing and helpful comments and information.

More information about Rent IT can be found at our official website - www.rentit.biz