RE: administrative staff using Macs?

To add to the statistics...

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Earth and Planetary Science has among its administrative staff (including myself wearing a 20% FTE admin hat) 6 macs and 3 PCs...

Among its professors and technical staff, I'd say it's pretty close to an even split between Mac and PC, with slight flavoring to PC--this doesn't include all the linux/unix/server boxes.

Because GIS doesn't run on MacOS (which is VERY irritating to geologists), the instructional lab is PC.  The student lab (for checking email, scanning, etc.) is mostly Mac with a few Windows.  All those machines are older gear (second tier use).

I support CIG (backup to EPS only), so I don't have exact numbers for EPS as a whole.

In Center for Isotope Geochemistry (CIG--bi-institutional research center), our crew of scientists and techs (some at LBNL) are as follows:

+ 18 portable macs (assigned one per user)

+ 5 stationery macs - G4 towers => one exclusive use, one doubled with a powerbook

                               3 iMacs => shared resource systems (guests, scanning station)

+ 2 portable windows

+ 1 windows tower - shared resource for Windows only, home-grown software (including DOS and old but no longer supported tools, sigh)

+ approx 5 windows lab controller computers (maintained by lab techs; lab controller software is proprietary and runs on older windows operating systems only)

I support only the CIG Mac systems, though occasionally provide backup to EPS folks when their Mac support person is unavailable.

Note:  Mac support represents only half of my job, even though I do custom installs on almost all of these systems and my users are fairly skilled in approximately 12 applications. My users are heavy on graphic data representation including multiple graphing and graphics applications, plus they can be pretty hard on their equipment when they travel or go in the field. In spite of our team growing, my overall time spent on support has been declining over the past 5 years.

I think that's a testimony to the ease of support and reliability of Mac systems.

- Marilyn

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Marilyn Saarni
Center for Isotope Geochemistry #4767
Univ of California and LBNL
Berkeley CA 94720-4767 - USA
[office 475 McCone Hall, Campus]
Email: saarni@eps.berkeley.edu or mesaarni@lbl.gov
Tel 510/643-5063 * Fax 510/642-9520