Benchmarking Software the Requires No Admin Rights?

[jerH]

I work for a government organization, so by definition our IT policies are atrocious. My office has a mix of computer hardware, purchased over many years, rarely upgraded, etc. My boss has asked me to help prioritize people for tech refresh. The most objective way I could think of was to have everyone run the same benchmark program and prioritize based on that. But since none of us have admin rights to our machines, I can't use anything that has to be "installed". I need a general purpose benchmark (not like a 3D gaming one) that can be run from the command line...any ideas?

 

[COLGeek]

Does your office maintain a list of what hardware was purchased when? Government offices often purchase hardware via various contracts and replace hardware in groups that are oldest or where warranty support is no longer available. These decisions are usually not based on the specific configuration of hardware, rather it is an age thing.

 

[jerH]

That would be too easy. After 4+ re-organizations, a revolving door of IT purchase managers, and years of "no refresh" followed by "we've got end of year money that we have to spend spend spend...buy computers!" there is no continuity at all. We've got desktops, we've got laptops. We've got Dell, HP, and custom systems from a local small business. We've got stuff that was top-of-the-line when it was new and stuff that was crap when it was bought, and is now worse than the older stuff. Practically nothing is under warranty...and everybody is of course convinced that their system is the worst.

 

[COLGeek]

How many physical systems are you using?

 

[jerH]

30-35...I haven't actually counted yet. My boss wants to do this within our office first, and then apply the same methodology at a higher level where we're talking 200-250...

 

[Alabalcho]

Someone in your organization must have admin rights over these computers, and if you make these changes (installing an application is a change) over his/her head, you're asking for trouble.

 

[jerH]

Hence the desire to find a benchmarking program that doesn't have to be "installed"... i.e. it's a single executable file that can be run as-is without the need to copy files all over the place and make registry entries. For example, the program for the great internet mersenne prime search has a benchmark mode, but it takes 30+ minutes to run and comes back with the millisecond timing of a bazillion computational tasks. But its one .exe that you can run without any admin rights. I'd like to find something similar that runs faster and returns a single composite score.

 

[COLGeek]

I would recommend something that would "inventory " the hardware. Like speccy or cpu-z. You want to get rid of the oldest stuff based on the systems physical configuration. A "speed" check won't provide enough detail. Just push the app out as an update and use the system administrator credentials like you should be doing now.