ThinkCentre S50 8183

...the PC after all! IBM’s ThinkCentre range represents IBM’s mid-range business workstations, enough power and multimedia capabilities to run the top end office and productivity, whilst keeping costs down to make the systems as affordable as possible. A hidden but equally important part of the ThinkCentres resides inside the computer and installed on the hard drives, these discrete design decisions and software packages that are shipped with the machines. ...
...the contents of the IBM ThinkCentre are nothing short of an engineers dream.

WHATS ON THE BOX
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The system itself comes pre-loaded with Windows XP Professional, along with a raft of other interesting bits of software. However the real hidden power of the machine is on the CD’s that came with the system. You will find the latest versions of IBM Rescue and Restore and IBM Director, these two pieces of software ... more

ThinkCentre... Think Smarter

IBM’s range of workstations have always been backed up with a long history, after all shouldn’t IBM be the experts, they did “invent” the PC after all! IBM’s ThinkCentre range represents IBM’s mid-range business workstations, enough power and multimedia capabilities to run the top end office and productivity, whilst keeping costs down to make the systems as affordable as possible. A hidden but equally important part of the ThinkCentres resides inside the computer and installed on the hard drives, these discrete design decisions and software packages that are shipped with the machines. I have recently installed 86 IBM ThinkCentre S50’s at work; this review is my attempt to distil my experiences into words.

WHATS IN THE BOX?
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When the box arrives at your door, or in my case three pallets full of them, you are presented with a small, but heavy box. Most of the box is taken up with packaging, all cardboard, so nicely recyclable. In amongst the packaging you will find everything you would expect to find with the average computer, PS2 Keyboard, USB Mouse, Manual, desk stand, and Software CD.

The system unit itself is small only 310mm by 350mm by 75 mm but very heavy as the machine is built primarily from steal. On the front there is a floppy drive, optical drive, headphone and microphone sockets, two USB ports, a power switch, power indicator LED and a hard drive activity indicator. On the back there are six additional USB ports, two serial ports, a parallel port, speaker socket, audio out socket, network port and keyboard and mouse connectors.

Some models also have two keys on the back that can be used to lock or unlock the case, preventing little fingers from taking a look at the innards of the sparkly new computer that has been set in front of them. Unfortunately these keys seem to be unique to each computer, on top of this the keys are un-numbered making it near on impossible to actually lock the cases for fear of loosing the keys or taking a few days just to find the right key in a large key ring.

The placement of the USB ports would be my next gripe, the ports on the front are jammed right between the power button and the microphone socket, making it near on impossible to plug a moderately sized USB key in without a extension lead. The back of the computer is hardly spacious, hundreds of leads flowing out of the back of makes it very hard to plug any additional equipment in without unplugging the surrounding devices.

One notable omission to the hardware inventory is the FireWire port it seems that IBM has deemed that FireWire is not required for business users. However there are two PCI slots that could be used to add FireWire expansion slots, or indeed any other expansion card.

WHATS IN THE BOX IN THE BOX
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Inside the computer is where your eyes really start to pop out, the boffins at IBM had a field day with this machine, the whole thing is virtually screw-less the case can be popped open by pressing two catches on either side of the case popping open much like the bonnet of a car. Unlike most computers you won’t find clumsy IDE cables, or trailing power cables; the whole system has been carefully designed so that all the cables are the exact length to be routed neatly round the edge of the case to their destination, the IDE cables themselves are quick release ribbon cables similar to those you find in some laptops, needless to say that all the components can be removed with a flick of a switch or the lifting of a leaver. To be quite frank, the contents of the IBM ThinkCentre are nothing short of an engineers dream.

WHATS ON THE BOX
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The system itself comes pre-loaded with Windows XP Professional, along with a raft of other interesting bits of software. However the real hidden power of the machine is on the CD’s that came with the system. You will find the latest versions of IBM Rescue and Restore and IBM Director, these two pieces of software will save hours of maintenance.

Rescue and Restore is IBM’s version of Norton Ghost, first and for most it is intended to create a backup image of your primary partition onto your hard drive. It does this from windows while the computer is running, simply by installing the Rescue and Restore package. Restoring is little more complex than pressing and holding enter when the computer is starting up, this will then boot into a “options menu” allowing you to select Rescue and Restore as one of your boot options, you can then choose to restore either the files or the whole partition.

Rescue and Restore does not stop there, if you are a network manager desperate to push out a image to all of your clients, you can quite simply create an image of one client, upload it to a server and then instead of choosing to restore the partition from the disk you download the image from the server and restore that instead. There are plenty of options to play around with.

Director is IBM’s remote management system, its primary role is to sit on each individual workstation, and monitor the system status, it is able to inform you if the hard drive starts to develop errors, or if one of the system fans stops operating, and a lot more beside. All of this data can be monitored from the Director Agent which you can install on one computer to manage a whole enterprise, or configure each workstation to send an e-mail when a problem occurs.

Of the pre-installed packages, probably the most useful is IBM Update Connector; this is IBM’s system firmware upgrade engine. Essentially it operates in much the same way as Windows Update does with SUS, however Update Connector will download and upgrade your BIOS across your enterprise at the click of a button.

SUMMARY
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Aside from the exclusion of FireWire in the box and the cramped position of the USB ports, the ThinkCentre range provides the average IT department in the average Small to Medium size business a standard platform. The software provided gives the administrator the control to effectively manage updates and monitoring without all the leg work. 

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