At my current job (very large corporation), I requested certain specs for my development machine, basically just lots of RAM and an SSD. I said I would be more than happy to pay for the hardware myself and they could have IT install the standard desktop.<p>It took 6 weeks for this request to be emailed around to various people for approval and no one (I saw the email chain) had the balls to make a decision <i>or even give their opinion</i> on the matter. Luckily, it finally hit someone that had both a brain and balls, whose reaction was basically "of course, give it to him immediately, the extra cost is meaningless."<p>The point of this is, at least to some degree, costs are not what hampers IT, you can offer to pay for something and they will still not let you have it. At mt previous job I got some very suspicious looks from a manager for bringing my own printer to work (to save 5 minutes a day walking to the printer).<p>I've seen it in many companies.....there's something else going on other than just budget, but I can't put my finger on it.
He mentioned billable rate, which might be the reason this isn't going to get fixed. If you're billing a client $250/hr for your employees' time, your incentive as a company is to maximize the time it takes to do things. Adding random 3 minute pauses to the workflow of your most expensive people would be an example of a "good thing" from a strictly financial perspective.<p>But then companies are seldom that aware of what's going on. Back in my Consulting Engineer days, I spent plenty of time trying to explain the simple math: "since you're billing me out at a 3.5 multiplier, it actually makes you more money to give me a raise". It never flew. So eventually I did.<p>Personally, I'm all in favor of big companies behaving this way. Less efficiency in other shops is a competitive advantage for mine.
What was the lag situation after an OS reimaging or reinstall?<p>Take a snapshot of a fresh OS install, with all necessary applications installed, <i>running on the old hardware</i>. Compare that with a snapshot of the old OS (before reinstallation), <i>running on the new hardware</i>. Generally, unless the hardware is really old, reinstalling Windows will get you a snappier system back.<p>If you're using an old HDD, consider swapping for a SSD.<p>If a little more performance is needed, consider overclocking the CPU by 15-20% if that's possible (a cpu cooler is much cheaper than a new machine).<p>Additionally, you should disable all graphic "special effects", Aero and other crap that comes with Windows.
I've had a lot more success with this tactic in small businesses than I have with large. It's really easy to go to an owner operator and express PC hardware costs relative to employee salary. For a $35k/year employee, an $875 PC upgrade is only 2.5% of their salary. It's hard to argue that you won't get a 2.5% productivity increase from keeping users in new PCs every couple of years. It's amazing how much more willing someone is to do their work when you make it less frustrating for them.
There's another obstacle besides IT: co-workers.<p>I once worked with a guy who used a 10 year old blurry "CRT" monitor. Repeatedly, I told to at least switch to LCD, but he wouldn't do it, citing that it would require a "business justification". If I were him, that monitor would have met with an unfortunate accident.<p>In such an environment, asking for a workstation that goes beyond "secretary grade" specs paints one as a gear-dandy.
In one of my first jobs as a coder we had little crappy PCs for development. They were ok, but a bit slow. When I left I wrote a polite email to the CEO pointing out the same thing - lag time x wages per hour x number of people in the team. A week later one of the devs emailed me and said they'd just recieved amazing new machines.
" but that has allowed me to experience a migration from Windows 2000 to Windows Vista."<p>Well there's your first mistake. This could just as easily be an argument to stop using crappy MS products.<p>(yhea yhea, i know, never going to happen).
"He urged me to summarize my data and findings in an email and then he would pass it on to some VP in the IT world."<p>ha. mail > /dev/managment_blackhole