Cabinet Office stuck with creaking PCs for five years
What, no scrappage plan for computers?
PC vendors looking to boost flagging sales by raiding the public purse can think again, after the Cabinet Office told MPs they would restrict their PCs to one per staffer and work their kit till they fell to bits
Tom Watson, Civil Service Minister at the Cabinet Office, outlined his department's efforts to reduce CO2 emissions in a Commons answer yesterday. He said the department last year used "929,000 kWh of electricity at a cost of £61,000 for its IT Services". This equated to 401 tonnes of CO2.
Desktops accounted for 420,000 kWh, printing 195,000kWh and the rest was down to its datacentre.
Asked what the department was doing to reduce greenhouse emissions, he reeled out a series of stock measures, including reducing the number of printers and replacing them with greener multifunction devices, putting monitors into standby, shutting down PCs after hours, using power management kit, offloading redundant kit and "starting to replace existing servers with storage area networking devices that implement storage virtualisation."
Sounds like a beanfeast for government suppliers, except that at the same time, he announced that "the lifecycle of all end user devices has been extended to five years" and "the number of PCs and laptops will be reduced to as close to one per person as possible.
At the same time, "thin client technology will be used with low-power consumption CPUs" and "services will be moved to a data centre using server technology that complies with the recommendations in the Greening Government ICT Strategy."
Hard-pressed tech vendors are keen to convince us that the best way to cut our energy usage, and therefore reduce CO2 emissions, is ditch our old kit and use shiny new, more efficient PCs.
The government professes to think the approach works for cars, and introduced a £2,000 subsidy in the budget to persuade drivers to scrap their old bangers and buy something less polluting.
But the Cabinet Office seems to think differently when it comes to tech kit, and will keep pushing its PCs till they fall apart. Then again, there aren't 1,000s of jobs in Labour constituencies dependent on PC kit. Are there? ®
COMMENTS
@first comment
Government requires air-gapped networks (they don't trust firewalls in many cases). This meant that at one gov. agency job, I had a desktop connected to the production network, another connected to the development network, and a laptop to access the systems for the outsourcing company I needed to book my time.
And if I had a need to use my own companies laptop (I was a contractor working through my own company for outsourcing company at the agency site) I would get out my laptop as well. I ended up using 2 KVM's with two keyboard, screens and mice, with the computers stacked up. Madness, but necessary to keep to the security rules.
Dept of Adminitrative Affairs
will get new shining computers if Sir Humphrey manages to outsmart Jim (again).
PS. when I was a government worker(!) the computers were called Commodors.
@Eddie Johnson - You're doing it all wrong!
Clearly you haven't a clue what you're doing! The rest of us professionals put the gigabit gear in the fridge, on the shelf above all the beer!
TFI Friday, guys!
:() { :|:& };:
Replace the lot with Sun Ray appliances.
Then you will be able to control what information makes it onto a USB stick, to get *ahem* lost in a car park.
Regarding the £2000 scrappage incentive for cars:
-> £1000 comes from the government, i.e. general taxation, i.e. "us".
-> £1000 is supposed to come from the manufacturer (price rise shenanigans, anyone?).
A) What incentives do I get for commuting by train every day?
B) Cars registered by 31July 1999 is the cut-off point for eligibility for the scheme. Is this an ongoing scheme whereby the cut-off point will be revised to 31 July 2000 at next years' budget?
D) Are there similar schemes in place for all other old energy consuming tech, from boilers to VCR players?
C) Or is this not about CO2 at all, and just about a handout to the car industry?
D) I thought the mantra was REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE - in that order?
E) If tech is fully functioning (Cars, PCs, et al), why should there be an incentive (funded by general taxation) to replace it (and thus subsidise the related industry)?
F) Isn't a scrappage incentive not just a "consumption subsidy" hiding under another name?
-> If you wanna buy something shinier, go ahead, feel free, and sell your old version at the market rates if you want to.
-> But don't expect me to subsidise others' purchases and call it a green initiative.
