Private machines must be administrated by someone. There are charges associated with this if the Engineering Computing Center is involved. DII will also do system administration by contract. A shared machine is a good choice when buying low-end machines. This allows a machine with a small disk to access user files on a server.
Additional software is also available to the user over the network.
Without access to a file server, a machine must have large local disks. There is no charge for administrating a shared machine in the College of Engineering. The blanket purchase order allows ordering workstations without having to go through a bid process. The prices in the following lists may not always be correct. Additionally, the ordering instructions seem to change for no reason at all.