Most of the time, customer just want to rent a notebook with basic specification for general application, so their basic requirement is very low and almost any Intel pentium 4 processor base notebook with wifi connectivity will do. For this kind of requirement, we have pentium M mobile, pentium 4, dual core, core 2 duo type of models to meet their requirement. There is very minimum checking required both by the customer side or by the rental company side.
Special requirement
However, when customer is renting for some special application (proprietary software) or game software, the spec of the notebook become crucial. It is the customer's duty to perform a thorough check on the notebook spec quoted before he accept the equipment. Generally rental company wouldn't know how well their customer's software will fit into this spec, it is the customer who knows more about their application.
Many of our customers performs thorough checking before they confirm their rental but unfortunately the word 'thorough' carries a different degree of depth to different people.
Below I would like to high light a few cases whereby customers have made some form of thorough checking but still in the end they face some difficulties when the notebooks or computers are delivered to them. Through these few cases, we may deduce a guideline as to what customer should do when performing a 'thorough checking'.
Case 1:
Customer A is interested to rent some PCs which are able to run virtualization training and they have identified that to do this training, they need to have processor which meet the following spec:
Intel® Virtualization Technology
Intel® 64 Architecture
Enhanced Intel SpeedStep® Technology
Execute Disable Bit
Intel® Trusted Execution Technology
They have identified 1 model of PC from our inventory i.e. the HP 7400 having a processor which meets the spec. This model is having an Intel Core 2 Duo E8300 (2.83Ghz/1333MHz/6MB L2). Both customer and us have done a lot of verification on this model and we were pretty sure this model meets their requirement. On top of this, we proposed also the HP 6530b which has a Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 (2.26Ghz/1000MHz/3MB L2) due to short of quantity available for HP7400.
After delivery, customer found out that the 7400 even though met all the required processor spec but it's BIOS is not design to support them! But the 6530b does support both by processor as well as by bios.
So, guide line number 1 is beside checking processor features, the CPU's BIOS must be checked as well.
Case 2:
Customer B asks for some notebook to run a game competition. Initially customer has given us the required spec and we found that at the time of request, we do not have any model matching those spec and we actually propose alternative with remarks.
It appears to us that customer has checked our proposed model's spec and via email they have confirmed and agreed very clearly the model and graphic card we proposed.
Unfortunately, during the game run proper, some of the units hanged after about half an hour!
After our technical staff check on this problem, it was found that the game software has a little bit of compatiblity issue with the model we proposed and actually there is a recommended plug in to solve this problem. Apparently our customer has done some testing as well after installing the game but however their testing just last a few minutes only (less than 10).
So apparently the problem does not surface within that few minutes and it only occur after about half an hour.
So guideline no 2 for this is:
The notebook must be tested running with the proprietary software for at least half an hour before one can confidently says that they are convinced that the software will run well on the notebook or PC.
