2014-09-04 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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people interested in the Windows-based tablets which I think is a good idea; they are very inexpensive and they give a user the ability to work on their tablet or their desktop and then the flexibility to pick up and go and still have full functionality. We’re exploring that a little bit now, we haven’t deployed many of those or any of those at this point. Ms. Kelly: But under laptop and pads or tablets, technology is probably worthless within three years? Mr. Jacobs: Technology changes every 18 months just flat out, and it changes. We typically get a three-year warranty on everything we buy so that we do get a decent. Ms. Kelly: But the capital investment by the technology being so outdated or used or abused or whatever. Mr. Jacobs: Yeah, there is a depreciation, too. Ms. Kelly: And very fast depreciation would you say? Mr. Jacobs: Yeah and that’s why the tablets are kind of intriguing cause they’re rather inexpensive. Ms. Maddox: They almost become a supply rather than a capital. Mr. Jacobs: Yeah they’re almost at that point like a commodity, like a toaster. As oppose to a thousand dollar PC, it’s a two hundred fifty to three hundred dollar tablet so there are certain places where that make a lot of sense. Ms. Kierkiewicz: Don, when you said you change things out every three years, are the machines leased or is the County purchasing them? Mr. Jacobs: We don’t have yet to change things out on a three-year basis. We use stuff until the smoke comes out of it. We are in the process of doing a pretty aggressive replacement of PCs at this point and that’s mostly because the XP operating system is no longer supported by Microsoft. So those are the oldest PCs we have and we’re replacing we hope, we’re, we think it’s going to be right around the area of 650, 700 PCs and if we’re lucky and get done in time it’ll be by the end of this year. We expect to have 220 of those deployed and they are leased. That answered, to answer your question. They are leased to own so we’re financing those out for three years and by the end of September we should have about 1/3 of those out on the floor. So we’re actively working on that. Ms. Maddox: How was the determination made where those would actually be deployed? Mr. Jacobs: That’s a really good question ‘cause we, I know people will come to me and say, “But I’m a supervisor, I get a”, and I’m like, “No, you have a Windows 7 machine. The guy who works for you that does really hard work has a really slow machine.” So we went for the oldest PCs first regardless of where they lived because they’re the ones that are going to die first and typically the way things have migrated 9