Three-year-itch: Upgrade those PCs--or refurbish them as needed?

  • Thread starter Thread starter J D Ross
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J D Ross

Three-year-itch: Upgrade those PCs--or refurbish them as needed?

According to industry estimates, more than 40 percent of PCs deployed in
business are at least three years old. Top-ranked PC makers Hewlett-Packard
and Dell, as well as the other PC and notebook purveyors, would have you
believe that PCs and laptops three years or older are a liability and in
need of replacement rather than as-needed refurbishment.
Are the PC manufacturers crying wolf in hopes of replacing a few hundred
million PCs and notebooks just a little past their prime? Or, are the
systems you've been squeezing more life out of during the economic downturn
really better off in the recycle bin?

http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2914603,00.html
 
Three-year-itch: Upgrade those PCs--or refurbish them as needed?

According to industry estimates, more than 40 percent of PCs
deployed in business are at least three years old. Top-ranked PC
makers Hewlett-Packard and Dell, as well as the other PC and
notebook purveyors, would have you believe that PCs and laptops
three years or older are a liability and in need of replacement
rather than as-needed refurbishment. Are the PC manufacturers
crying wolf in hopes of replacing a few hundred million PCs and
notebooks just a little past their prime? Or, are the systems
you've been squeezing more life out of during the economic
downturn really better off in the recycle bin?

http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2914603
,00.html
Click to expand...

I still have some Pentium II systems (circa May 1997) running at the
company I work for, running Windows 95 which is very SLOW and is quite
unreliable. It's kind of funny: one of our departments had two wireless
laptops that we replaced two months ago that were running, get this:
Windows 3.1 with Cisco wireless cards! They used a terminal emulation
program to get access to a Unix type mainframe over at Siemens, so they
really didn't need anything fancy hardware/software wise to run them.

Being in the hospital biz, older hardware CAN be a liability. I
haven't read the whole HIPPA technical compliance white paper, but I
have heard we need to secure our PCs much more securely. We want
everyone running Windows 2000 using NTFS file system, etc, etc. We are
slowly killing off the old machines and replacing them with sexier, 2.4
GHz machines running Windows 98 SE.

The more older hardware you keep, the more problems you have and the
more support calls you will get. Patches now are pretty non-existent
for Windows 95. In order to get access to a certain website, we had to
replace a fleet of Windows 95 machines with Windows 98 SE, because IE 6
won't install on Windows 95.

SuperTech
 
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