Tech Forum

RussellHltn wrote:It's supposed to be a on a 3-year

I've never heard of a 3-year replacement policy, at least not any reported on this forum or by anyone I have associated with. I think you're confusing this with the policy adopted by a few FM groups in the last year because of budget constraints. That local policy applied to computers that had already reached the end of the 5-year replacement cycle which had been the policy up to that point. Of those computers, 1/3 would be replaced after 5 years, 1/3 after 6 years, and 1/3 after 7 years.

So it's not a 3-year replacement cycle, but a 5-7 year replacement cycle for those FM groups who have made that choice.

Alan_Brown wrote:I've never heard of a 3-year replacement policy,

Whoops. Typo. It was supposed to be 5 year. I've made the correction.

Would it be fair to say that the FM groups are under budget pressure and the original 5-year plan is getting spread out?

As of yet, I haven't seen any new official policy, but too many groups came up with a 3-year spread to make me think it was coincidence.

As for "replace on failure", that's always there. I wouldn't be too surprised but what some FM groups are saying that now rather than holding out a promise for "next year" that they may not be able to keep.

RussellHltn wrote:Would it be fair to say that the FM groups are under budget pressure and the original 5-year plan is getting spread out?

That's somewhat reasonable, although in the many areas where the only policy at this point is to replace on failure, "getting spread out" seems a bit misleading.

RussellHltn wrote:As of yet, I haven't seen any new official policy, but too many groups came up with a 3-year spread to make me think it was coincidence.

I've seen a total of 2 such posts (one in Ohio, one simply in US), plus your posts claiming that it is a widespread policy. I can't find any post from you claiming that your local FM group has that policy; but if that is the case, that would make 3. I have no way of knowing if the two (or three) posts were from people in the same area, whereas the 5 "replace on failure" posts are from Utah, Colorado, Arizona, Nebraska, and Florida. That would be at least 4 and probably 5 different FM areas. That is indeed too many to be a coincidence.

But the evidence is pretty thin for "too many groups" having the 3-year spread policy. For all we can tell from the data, there is one FM area in the whole church with the 3-year spread policy. But with 5 on one side, and 1 or 2, possibly 3 on the other side, no one could reasonably conclude that the policy used in the vast majority of cases is an exception.

RussellHltn wrote:Since many of the machines were purchased at the same time, they're all coming due for replacement at the same time. The FM groups have been asked to spread out replacements over a 3 year period.

This is what our FM group told us. The three year spread from 2010-2012 is to balance the load. They intend to return to the replace after five years (or failure) mode after that.

RussellHltn wrote:I think 512 is the sweet spot of most bang for the buck. One trick you can do it buy 512MB, put it in one machine, take it's old 256MB and stick it into another. Two upgrades for the price of one.

Exactly what we did with our 14 wards and branches. Purchase seven new sticks, swap and combine seven old sticks. Worked great. (Make sure, of course, that all machines use the same type of memory.)

We left the stake at 512MB. The delay has always been in boot up, shut down, and memory swapping. The added memory made it so that the hard drive is no longer the main memory source for programs. The size of the data base was never really the problem. MLS was set to require more than 256MB of memory to function, so the memory to hard drive swapping was interminable. [grin]

RussellHltn wrote:I wonder if any of them went with "Stake A" in 2009, "Stake B" in 2010 .....

I believe this is what our FM Group is doing in our area: 1/3 of the stakes in his area will be replaced this year, 1/3 next year (our stake) and 1/3 the year after.