thedqs wrote:The Stake has a budget for this and it should go through the stake tech budget as the discretion of your stake president.
I don't believe the stake has a budget for computer upgrades. Individual stakes may set aside parts of their budgets for this, but that wouldn't apply to all stakes.
I would agree that it's best to get the SPs approval. After all the machine belongs to the stake and the folks who use it the most are called by the stake.
RussellHltn wrote:I don't believe the stake has a budget for computer upgrades. Individual stakes may set aside parts of their budgets for this, but that wouldn't apply to all stakes.
I would agree that it's best to get the SPs approval. After all the machine belongs to the stake and the folks who use it the most are called by the stake.
I mentioned this to the stake clerk today, something I should have done last week when I first heard this rumbling. He's well aware whose computer it is. Meanwhile I have to play nice with the ward in question - it's my ward and all. Unfortunately, this is by no means the first time something of this magnitude has come up.
I wanted to follow up on my original post... I received approval and the go-ahead from our SP to upgrade each of the ward computers in our stake. I purchased a bunch of single 512MB RAM modules and put them into each system - upgrading them to 640MB of RAM. We have noticed significant performance boost! Primarily with the booting and starting up of the OS. MLS also starts a lot quicker now too!
My personal opinion - this was a worthwhile upgrade!
First, I did the Stake Computer. 512 did not help with MLS performance. Neither did 1 GB. Around 1.5GB, things got a little better.
I tested it on a dual processor machine with 1 GB and that was appreciable.
Connecting through the FHC Broadband did help on transmitting times - a little.
As Stake Clerk, part of my calling is to manage the Technology in the Stake. This includes recommending technology budgeting for items such as memory upgrades. I am blessed to have 4 assistants, one of which is a Technology Specialist, so we try to stay ahead.
We had intended to do a blanket upgrade to as much memory as we could put in the Stake and Ward computers. However, we are 40 months into a 60 month lifecycle, so we are going to "push" the lifecycles as much as possible and wait for the new machines before upgrading memory in them.
I would not recommend spending Stake dollars on equipment if there is less than 2 year's lifecycle left. Check with your FM Group to find out when they intend to do your lifecycle replacements.
Wade E. Burt
Gallatin Ward High Priest Group Leader
The answer I got from HQ is that MLS 2.6 and higher should be on at least 512MB, if not 1GB. However, RusselHltn is right: there is no special budget or reimbursable account for these costs. The stake/ward would have to make any upgrades from their own budget allocation. The brother I talked to said that many units have reported significant improvements upon upgrading from 256MB. Just thought I'd pass that along!
One thing I may have missed regarding this discussion is how fast are the Dell's CPUs rated for? Are they 1.8ghz, 2.4ghz, what? That can have an impact also, where RAM doesn't do the trick.
Are all the Dells that were first deployed in the MLS rollout running at the same clock speed?
darthwader wrote:I purchased a bunch of single 512MB RAM modules and put them into each system
Single? While it will work, you might check and be sure that the machines don't interleave and wouldn't run faster with two 256MB rather then a single 512MB. Two modules can raise the effective buss speed.
RussellHltn wrote:Single? While it will work, you might check and be sure that the machines don't interleave and wouldn't run faster with two 256MB rather then a single 512MB. Two modules can raise the effective buss speed.
wadeburt wrote:First, I did the Stake Computer. 512 did not help with MLS performance. Neither did 1 GB. Around 1.5GB, things got a little better.
You might clean out the temp files, defrag, and other hard drive tuning.
wadeburt wrote:We had intended to do a blanket upgrade to as much memory as we could put in the Stake and Ward computers. However, we are 40 months into a 60 month lifecycle, so we are going to "push" the lifecycles as much as possible and wait for the new machines before upgrading memory in them.
Think about where those machines will go. If they might be used to upgrade the FHC, then the investment won't be lost. 256MB is still too small for normal FHC use.
If you to a CTRL-ALT-DEL on the computer which brings up the Windows task Mgr and look at the performance tab, then look under the PF Usage you will see how much memory your computer is trying to use. If it is using More memory than you have installed, then your computer is paging/thrashing and that really hurts your overall computer performance.
We had the standard 256MB installed on all the computer in our Stake, but when I saw how slow the computers were after the Desktop 5.5 upgrade and saw they were always using over 300MB I knew why our computers were so slow.
I got approval from our Stake and upgraded all the computers (11 in all) to 768MB (it was only a $2 price difference for 256MB memory modules over 128MB. I bought them in pairs to take advantage of the dual channel memory. Things do run faster after the upgrades. BTW, I also added 1GB flash drives to each computer for MLS and other backups.
256MB RAM - Follow up... RAM upgraded to 640MB!
