...
- I would also stress that many users like to have a multiple display environment. whilst this is possible with laptops, it may incur extra costs compared to a desktop (eg external graphics card to drive high res displays etc)
- With a docking station it appears fairly standard nowadays to support 2 displays
- the other thing is that it would be very useful to have docking stations for laptops to ease the integration into a desktop environment. however, certain types of laptops (eg apple) do not sell official ones. also, one should probably still purchase mice and keyboards adding to extra costs.
- Docking stations are very important.
- Some people (not all) will want separate mice and keyboards. There are quite a lot left over from decommissioned machines etc. I believe they also have a longer lifetime than the computers.
- if a user's "sole" machine breaks down, what is the expected downtime? how much productivity will be lost? will desktop admin's SLA's be beefed up in order to reduce this 'productivity outage'
- I suspect a small stock of loaner laptops for such eventualities would be needed
- i, and many others in the group, run virtual machines for testing and evaluation on our desktops. whilst it's fine to also run them on our laptops, we may want to keep things running whilst at home. does this mean that we shall/should get server space to run such environments on? who pays for that?
- This is true but I do not believe it is a large fraction of the people
- If possible placing them on centrally managed servers in the data center would simplify cybersecurity requirements (e.g. not proliferating special ACLs to allow access to the servers)
- i think you have pretty much everything :) although the list makes it sounds like everyone will just want really expensive laptops (which is true, but a hard sell for the accountants)
- Indeed, there is no free lunch
- i also wish to clarify that this is only in respect to SLAC owned machines... that we are free to pay bring in our own laptops, ipads etc....?
...