Twenty-Four Seats, One Grant, One Deadline
Sunrise Public Senior Secondary School in Kota runs a 24-seat computer lab for its Class 11 and 12 IT vocational batch. Twenty machines are eight years old: dual-core processors, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB hard disks and Windows 10, and they take about six minutes to boot. Four machines bought three years ago already have 8 GB RAM and SSDs. The school has won a one-time grant of ₹1,80,000 and must run a new accounting practical from the coming July session; the software vendor's sheet says 8 GB RAM, a 128 GB SSD and Windows 11. A local vendor offers either refurbished 8 GB / 256 GB SSD units at ₹14,500 each, or RAM-plus-SSD upgrade kits at ₹4,200 per existing machine; Windows 11 licences are extra at ₹1,100. The lab loses power for 20 to 40 minutes on most afternoons and has a single 5 kVA UPS. Sixty students must be accommodated in rotating batches, and the accountant wants the money spent before 31 March.
1. The principal insists that all 24 seats must run the new software by July. Prepare a spending plan for ₹1,80,000, show the arithmetic, and state plainly what cannot be delivered.
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Step 1 - test the assumption behind the upgrade kit. The kit only helps if the eight-year-old dual-core machines can actually run Windows 11. Windows 11 needs TPM 2.0, UEFI with Secure Boot and a processor on Microsoft's supported list; an eight-year-old dual-core desktop is very unlikely to qualify, and the vendor's sheet explicitly says Windows 11. So ₹4,200 x 20 = ₹84,000 plus 20 licences at ₹1,100 = ₹22,000, total ₹1,06,000, may buy twenty machines that still fail the requirement. That is the trap in the question.
Step 2 - cost the compliant options. Refurb unit plus licence = ₹15,600. Ten units = ₹1,56,000, leaving ₹24,000 for a second UPS, cabling and a spare SSD. Twelve units = ₹1,87,200, which is over budget before any power work.
Step 3 - count real seats. Four existing 8 GB machines (verify TPM and CPU first) plus 10 refurbs = 14 compliant seats, not 24. Sixty students at 14 seats means five rotation groups; at 24 seats it would be three.
Recommendation. Buy 10 refurbished units, keep ₹24,000 for power and network, verify and licence the four newer machines, and tell the principal in writing that 24 compliant seats is not achievable with ₹1,80,000. Ask for either a phased second tranche or permission to run the practical in five smaller batches for one session.
Why not the kit. It spends most of the grant keeping unsupported hardware alive, and those machines would still be slow, out of warranty and unable to install the required operating system. Buying fewer working seats is better than buying twenty broken promises.
2. The vendor says the existing 5 kVA UPS will comfortably carry 24 desktops. Do you accept that, and what do you do with the money left over?
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Work through the load rather than the label. Assume a modest desktop of about 150-200 W plus a 25 W monitor, so roughly 200 W per seat. Twenty-four seats x 200 W = 4,800 W. A UPS is rated in VA, and at a power factor near 0.8 that needs about 6 kVA before efficiency losses. A 5 kVA unit running at or beyond its rating gives only a minute or two of ride-through, heats up and ages quickly. So the vendor's claim is at best marginal and probably wrong.
Check, don't assume. Is the UPS line-interactive or online? How old are the batteries, since a four-to-five-year-old battery bank may hold a fraction of its rated runtime? Are the actual wall sockets on UPS output, or only the server? Is the switch or router on it, because without network the machines cannot save to the shared folder anyway.
What I would do. Do not put 24 desktops on it. Put the switch, router, teacher console and about eight student machines on the 5 kVA unit, buy a second smaller UPS of roughly 2 kVA from the remaining ₹24,000, and put surge protectors on the rest. Enable autosave every two minutes and teach save-after-every-entry, so a 20-minute outage costs a few lines and not a file. Then test it deliberately: switch off the mains during a practice session and see what actually survives.
Reasoning. The real risk is not the outage itself but a corrupt file or a half-written practical record during an exam, and a UPS that is sized on hope converts a manageable risk into a guaranteed one.
3. Two weeks before 31 March the vendor offers to deliver the refurbished units with Windows 11 already installed, no separate licence invoice, and a cash discount. What is your decision and why?
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Refuse the offer as framed. Four separate problems sit inside one sentence.
- Licensing. 'Windows 11 installed' is not 'Windows 11 licensed'. An unlicensed or imaged copy means the school uses software it has no right to use, receives no security updates, and can be caught in an audit. On machines that will hold student records, an unknown image may also carry bundled malware.
- Audit trail. The grant is public money and the accountant needs a GST invoice in the school's name plus serial numbers in an asset register to sign the utilisation certificate. A cash deal without a licence invoice cannot be explained to an auditor.
- Warranty. Refurbished units need a written warranty and a report on SSD and battery health; a cash, no-paper sale usually means no recourse.
- Process. A cash discount offered to a school purchase committee is a governance red flag, not a saving.
What I would do instead. Ask for a proper quotation with an OEM licence or a licence invoice per unit, a one-year written warranty, and a GST invoice in the school's name. If compliant units then cost more, buy fewer units - ten licensed machines beat fourteen unlicensed ones. Reinstall from official media, apply updates and set a standard image before handover, and log every serial number in the asset register.
If the deadline cannot be met compliantly, ask the accountant whether the grant permits a later purchase date. A compliant purchase in April is better than an unauditable one in March.