Something that was keeping me awake last night was the thought of how technology has evolved over the last 25 years, with focus on the PC market in particular.
It doesn’t seem like that long ago I was running a 80286/386 machine (That’s really old for those who don’t know circa 1992) with Windows 3.11 (or not) and DOS 6.22.
Then along came Windows 95, all of a sudden there was a surge of people needing to upgrade out of their 286 / 386 machines and into the newer 486 or Pentium type systems.
The OS seemed to control the life cycle of these machines.
It was as if office and home computers lasted only 2-3 years or whenever the next cycle of operating system was being launched. Windows Me, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista, followed in a quick succession to each other.
Hardware manufacturers were pumping out faster and faster machines with more RAM to keep up with this change and demand.
Over the last 8-10 years if you are not using your computer for intense gaming or graphic design, video editing things have slowed.
Here’s the thing.
I have an old HP machine in my garage I experimented on today, Core 2 Duo, 3 GB Ram and 150GB hard drive runs Windows 7 just fine. Would perform most MS office tasks, without any issue. Indeed with an SSD installed (under $80) and another 1GB ram, it would make a great machine.
Which brings me to what invades my Facebook timeline, daily.
EX-Lease PC’s – Appears we have a flood of them on the market, and several re-sellers keen to offload these so called “end of life” PC’s
I honestly cant get over the specs of some of these desktop systems. 4 Core Xeon, 8GB RAM good graphics cards, all for well under $700 depending on age.
As a machine to do your everyday tasks at work, Outlook, Excel, Word and Powerpoint these are excellent PC’s in their own right. Even if you shelled out a couple of hundred for a RAM upgrade this would certainly make a great computer for some years to come.
Is this a forced upgrade due to lease expiry?
Could business save money and perhaps help the environment buy buying outright and limiting the frequency of upgrade?
Also consider upgrading memory and replaceable parts to extend the life of the system?
Anyway, back to my main point. If you are a large business leasing multiple PC’s I would certainly reflect on this method of keeping and up to date PC desktop fleet.
Laptops will need more consideration, as battery life starts to become an issue at around year 3 under normal use, and inherently have a harder life.
Thanks for reading!
Wade
The Computerer