It's a riddle faced by virtually every IT director: how to fulfill users' desire for more muscular computing resources while still obliging administrators' commands to keep education spending down. Against long odds, many district technology directors have been fulfilling both counts, optimizing their computing systems with improvements that pay for themselves--or in some cases, as one will see in this roundup of consummate IT optimization projects, actually do considerably better than break even. This article features success stories of some district technology directors of how they turned modest investments into maximum results.