We're taking a bit of a breather while the world rearranges its underpants. Meanwhile, the other blog is here.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Lap dancing

We're planning on buying some new laptops for staff training and public learning purposes. Officially we have to buy all our hardware from the IT Section. Also officially, Corporate Procurement advises that we may want to look in the catalogue of a well-known high street store. The reason being that it's £2,000 each cheaper to buy them that way.

If we buy the laptops from IT we're allowed to plug them into the corporate network. We have no need to do so: staff will be working with USB sticks and we wouldn't want the public on the corporate network in any case.

The clincher is that if we buy from IT, as well as being more expensive, they disable the sound card and the wireless network functionality. Not really what you want on a learning resource in buildings served by the council's new town-centre wifi hotspots.

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