well, if your a sysadmin i would suggest planning a good strategy of hardware in similar to this:

1- Most important is motherboard - would suggest selecting a recent, stable and good motherboard combined with 'affordable' if possible letting you upgrade new processors and ram in the next 18 months.
2- Processor type - this will be chosen after you know exactly what users really need to run on their machines. If you have a machine running OCS-Inventory and GLPI you will have the most described data you need. At this time i would go for a mid-end Core 2 Duo as the average user wont be doing much more than office applications (this will depend on each department is running) that run on server side, so they will be running at most client software that connects to servers. stick with a socket that can be upgraded at least by double processing speed.
3- In case you have developers teams, i would suggest the same hardware layout with top processors and plus more ram. i believe the average user would need like core2duo @ 2.13Ghz and 2 Gb ram, just change the processor for the development team like core2duo @ 3.2Ghz and 6Gb ram plus and fast hard drives (this will be a must for running SQL servers and stuff..)

i honestly would assemble a hardware/support team, choose a really nice vendor for a no-brand pc's. The costs will be much lower and you will have what you need for that period of time and more. you just need to have a good plan and really know what users really need to run on each different department. use GLPI and OCS together.

4- OS - Just use Microsoft or any kind of proprietary OS if you really can't substitute it for a Open Source solution, like infra-structure services, file servers, etc.. this will cut your costs a lot to.

good luck :)

The problem is privacy, control, FREEDOM! imagine the net as a world you just borned in, does your brain actually accepts the fact that you have to pay for a something in a world that you bourned in, free as a bird? Plus, the first step is to make you accept privacy policy's, second step is to make you pay a little amount of money, next thing you will do is to pay a your ass off just for navigating on the super controlled web. But yet, you dont even mind about it because you are plugged into the matrix and your just worst than sheep... QARFNVC