Replace or Upgrade? PC support divided

Crucial ANZ did a straw poll of 350 Australian and New Zealand enterprise administrators and not surprisingly both camps – new or upgrade – were chasing the same end goal of a cost-effective way to get faster systems to increase worker productivity.

When asked what they typically do when a desktop or laptop is slowing down or having performance issues, the responses illustrated that natural IT scarcities of time and money heavily influence this decision. System upgrades often involve installing more RAM (easy) or replacing an existing hard drive with an SSD (more time). System replacements involved provisioning a new desktop and operating system.

Crucial SSD Senior Product Line Manager Jonathan Weech explained, “Every business has a scarcity. For most, it is very likely that dealing with a tight monetary or time budget denies you the ability to make a huge difference in your organization’s IT when it slows down. That makes finding cost-effective solutions critical. In some instances, that means upgrading old systems with memory and SSDs and in others, that means buying new systems.”

{loadposition ray}

Crucial make high-performance memory and solid-state drives (SSD) so you could forgive it for any inherent bias in the poll.

From the authors experience the addition of an extra 4GB of RAM (total 8) or replacing a slower HDD with an SSD makes sense – if the remainder of the components have a reasonable serviceable life left. But there are often other causes like network speeds and poorly provisioned desktops that also make a difference.

Replacing a HDD may either mean cloning or provisioning the operating system (OS) and desktop apps to an SSD. That takes time and cloning can often transfer existing OS issues over to the new machine so many would provision a new desktop and OS anyway.

The poll revealed that 52% of organizations replace their systems every three to four years and 18% every four to five years. Interestingly 19% replaced every one to two years.

Weech said, “That is a short life cycle for computers that can and do last much longer. Extending this lifecycle by a lower cost upgrade to increasing performance and productivity can only improve your standing within the organisation!”

He added, “In my experience, in larger organisations where time is critical, and the IT Manager has the option to either upgrade or replace computers, they almost always choose to replace them. Time is valuable, with many systems to manage, and when it just doesn’t make sense to spend time installing memory or SSDs. However, in smaller organisations IT managers tend to “run them until they crash.” They upgrade systems every few years to make this happen.”

The bottom line revolves around the question of scarcity. Is it time, money or both? Every organisation is different, which shapes the opinion of the IT managers within them and creates a nearly 50-50 split on whether to upgrade or replace computers. In general, when money is limited, it’s best to consider an upgrade before replacement. But when your time is more limited, and you have budget flexibility, you may want to replace aging systems. Only you know the nuances that are unique to your organisation’s culture and IT. Choose the approach that’s right for you and your users because either way, the outcome is the same – faster performance and improved productivity.

Mortenson concluded, “More than a quarter of IT managers say cost-effectiveness is the driving reason they’d upgrade instead of replacing old computers – and more than a quarter of them say that’s the same reason they’d replace old computers instead of upgrading them! The most cost-effective upgrade you can get is with memory, and that’s something that likely only takes you a couple of minutes to install in each computer.”

He strongly recommends that system administrators buy more time – extend the replacement cycle and create less e-waste.