Repair Vs Replace

"You have a 2010? That's an eight year old computer"

"Yuck I know..It's so old and slow, we should get a new one"

"Have you seen the new ones? They're so pretty"

"I know right, I'll talk to Bob, I'll tell him we need a new one, I just can't get my work done anymore."

How many times do you think this conversation is happening in your office?

As every August comes around, you're putting together your budget for the following fiscal year's technology upgrades, and you're just tired of hearing your team complain and nag about the performance of their work computers, so you pencil in upgrades for the team and look to how or where you can cut from to meet the requests.

With so many applications moving to a cloud based application, Office, Mail, Financial Applications, Billing, Scheduling Softwares, Social Media Management, etc much of what we used to us our local machine's processing and compute power on is now being handled within the application owner's infrastructure located in various data centers around the world. What we now see is our machine's need to access those locations much quicker than we ever have. Consider looking into internet options for your facility to make sure you have the bandwidth required to meet the demands of your team and their workloads. If you already have the correct bandwidth to perform your work, now what?

Maybe it is the machine. So what should be considered to help solve your machine's inability to keep up? It can be as simple as a Random Access Memory (RAM) upgrade and even better paired with a conversion to a Solid State Drive (SSD) if your machine isn't already equipped with one. With a RAM upgrade it is possible to over do it so don't automatically assume you should max out your machine. Too much RAM for your computer can cause your Central Processing Unit (CPU) to lag behind because it is unable the process the increased amount of requests now being sent to it by the upgraded RAM, however for most office related computers being used today, the CPUs are significantly under utilized causing a higher output of performance with a RAM upgrade.

Now we understand there are applications that are still run locally that can be very heavy and require a lot of resources to run effectively so this isn't a one size fits all solution, but this conversation is more about taking pause to consider, do we really need to replace this machine or can we upgrade it? There are so many upgrade options for computers that will extend their effective usage period that can cost far less than replacing the entire unit.

A recent example we has was this Apple iMac 27" Mid-2010 that wouldn't power on. It only required a new power supply and had an installed price of $100 for a full repair. At that time the owner could have just had a functioning machine again, however they took advantage of us already having it open and elected to have us upgrade the old HDD with a 1TB SATA SSD and to quadruple the RAM from 4GB to 16GB. The machine will be cleaned of it's eight years of dust and dirt, closed up and this Mid-2010 will be running and performing for their everyday work operations on par with the 2018 models that retail starting at $1799. This entire repair and upgrade on this 2010 was only $500.

There is a lot of financial waste in our lives, both in business and personal. This customer acknowledged she had an opportunity and was able to put over $1,000 back into their business with just one decision on one machine. How much could your business put into reserves, into marketing, into new hires, or company perks with a repair first mindset? Just a topic worth considering.

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