When it comes to replacing computers, many consumers and businesses wait as long as possible before committing to an upgrade. However, those businesses would actually be better off in almost every way if they replaced their computers as part of a standard process based on the hardware age.
There are many drawbacks to using an old computer that aren’t immediately visible. All of these result in costs to the business, whether it is due to lost employee productivity, downtime, or lost data on failed drives.
If any of the above issues are visible to a client, they can also cause loss of business purely on the perception of inadequacy or unreliability.
A major difference overall is the gradually decreasing performance that every computer suffers from as time goes on. This is due to the actual mechanical parts wearing down as well as bloat from applications and files.
Additionally, with each new software update, there is more and more of a chance of business software no longer running on older hardware or operating systems.
Computers have many moving parts that have different expected lifetimes. Past four years, it is likely that different hardware components will start failing one by one every four or five months.
Each of these failures will result in a service call to diagnose the problem and replace the part, while the employee is not working.
Hard drive failures are almost always unrecoverable. If that employee does not have a backup in place, there is little anyone can do to restore the lost data.
However, if the upgrade is done while the PC is still functional, absolutely everything can be copied over to the new computer.
This includes files, but also things that aren’t usually backed up, such as applications and user specific settings in their commonly used programs.
On a four-year cycle, each new computer will be at least one major operating system version apart. Operating systems such as Windows 7 and Windows 10 are the framework of the computer and are therefore much harder to change on a computer already in use.
The service charge and software errors for such an installation would be as much or more than buying a new hardware component.
Each new operating system also contains hundreds, if not thousands, of patches to fix security vulnerabilities.
With each passing day, an old computer becomes more and more vulnerable as new holes are found in its programming. Many 5+ year-old operating systems no longer meet the requirements for mandates such as HIPAA.
The price of a new mid-range computer is usually the same as one or two of those service calls. And a new computer would avoid all of the other costs discussed above, usually resulting in savings more than double the price of the new PC.
Enacting a company-wide policy to replace PCs by hardware age also eliminates a great deal of hassle for users, clients, and your IT department.