One of the coolest FoxPro apps I ever shipped worked on 2 Gb 10" tablet-network hybrids with 32Gb SSD storage. Taken into the field for data gathering and docked in the home office to upload data to the mothership and gather tomorrow's assignments. If they dropped one out of their truck onto the driveway, we had to spend another $129 to replace it.

Hm.. tablets. I don't know if this is applicable to your case, but MS is permitting vendors to ship devices with 32 GB SSD HDDs and full-blown Windows 10 on them. First time somebody is confronted with an MS forced "upgrade", the thing tanks, because there isn't enough extra space to handle the downloading/unpacking etc etc. After many weeks of struggling, the intrepid Susan Bradley (the "Patch Lady" for those who know her) finally figured out how to get an upgrade installed by plugging in a USB drive for extra storage and fiddling around with it (I can't remember the details but she may actually have had to temporarily merge the USB with the SSD as one logical partition; not something your typical user is gonna do). As she said, it shouldn't be that hard, and MS never should have permitted those vendors to ship those machines.

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Windows 10 now requires 32 GB of space for itself (build "1903"). That means you need 64 GB in order to cope with the download/installation/cleanup process for those eventual feature "upgrades" that we, as mere pawns in MS's marketing game, are no longer allowed to ignore. And some people have been speculating that the OS space is likely to double to 64 GB in the near future. That would mean a 128 GB HDD would have no room left at all for anything else.

128 Gb (billions of bytes! sheesh!) was a minimum, absolutely. You spec'ced machines without customizing. More is better, nearly always.

Well, a 256 GB SSD HDD seems to be one of the most common configurations in off-the-shelf laptops these days.

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So modernity expects a person like me to be happy with 256 GB. But I've always been a fan of over-provisioning because the unpredictable and the unexpected is an everyday thing in my life.

Sure. Are these field machines you expect to be beaten to death in a couple of years or long-term cubicle machines as investments you plan to keep alive for 4-5 year? And what do you run on them? That would guide you to pick between workaday Inspirons vs. high-performance Lattitudes for example, sticking with Dell as a f'rinstance.

We've been able to get 5-7 years out of most of our ASUS and Acer machines up to now. I have one guy who, though he never leaves his office, insists on using a laptop instead of a desktop because he refuses to allocate more space. He's had three hard drives fail on three laptops over the last 9 years. But he also periodically throws tantrums at equipment and has been known to physically break pretty good-quality scanners and even big ol' copiers. So who knows? Maybe he picks up the laptop and flings it at the wall on occasion.

We have around 40 laptops (and around 100 desktops). Somewhere between 15 and 20 of the laptops travel constantly; the rest are at the main office and used occasionally for presentations, or by traveling staff who come into the office to do "paper" work on them on a regular basis.

I had one of the traveling laptops die due to a controller failure a couple of years ago. But that's about it. We replaced a bunch of them with newer models about the same time as that one, not because there was anything wrong with them, but because New York State, in its infinite wisdom, gave us a bunch of money and told us we had to buy new laptops for that particular contract. Which was good because the old ones were i3 and dog slow for anything other than web browsing, and we replaced them with i7s.

Some of these older more-or-less stationary i3 laptops are also dog-slow running my agency-wide Foxpro app. Travelers who need to use that app get to it via RDP, where it is actually quite snappy, because it lives in a VM on a massively-overprovisioned hypervisor/SAN cluster. We'll see if that continues to be the case after we put a VPN on the RDP channel (another one of those fun NYS requirements).

As for HDD size (as Arlo Guthrie might say, "Remember HDD size? It's a song about HDD size.") although some of these travelers are fervently believed by the state Health Department not to need to store any highly sensitive PII or PHI on the machines, in fact they do it all the time; hundreds of downloaded partially-completed PDF insurance forms. And we have nurses who do field assessments using an offline system that stores a lot of local data until they can get internet access and synch it with a website. And people in general are packrats. I can tell them to delete stuff they don't need until I'm blue in the face, to little or no effect. I'd rather let them accumulate in peace than have them constantly pester my help desk guys with complaints about running out of room.

And my policy is that, regardless of the original purpose for which they are purchased, the devices should all be interchangeable so they can easily be reassigned. So if only a few of them need an i7 and 512 GB of HDD space right now, then they all should have that to meet potential future needs.

Thanks.

Ken