Intel: Small Businesses Burdened by Aging PCs

[Zarathustra[H]]

Most business PC's are MS Office, email and web browsing machines.

Provided it was upgraded with enough RAM, even a 15 year old PC would do just fine in that capacity.

There is NO NEED AT ALL for the vast majority of users, especially in businesses, for the excessive CPU power we have these days.

If not for Youtube, most users would probably get by just fine with a 200Mhz Pentium, if the motherboards back then didn't have such a low ram limit.

That being said, I was just upgraded to an ivy bridge laptop at work, and I'm not complaining.

 

[nutzo]

16 years in IT has taught me a lot, but the most important thing is that old equipment is more expensive to support than new equipment is to buy. After 3 years, when it dies, let it die. After 5 years, kill it.

Well, I've been in IT for 30 years

The general rule I quote is to plan for systems to last 3 years, but try for 6. I still have some employee's using 8 year old 2.4Ghz P4's, and 5 year old dual core systems. They just run office and a couple really old apps (think Windows 95), which is fine with Windows 7 32 bit and 2GB - 4GB of ram.


We buy high end laptops for some of our technical users, and replace them every 2.5 to 3 years due to the heavy requirements. I re-image the old laptops, and hand them down to other users for another 3 years, or until they aren't worth repairing.

I still have a couple 8 year old servers in use, and several 7 year old servers. They've have no problems, and still work fine, so why replace them?
However, I will be phasing out the oldest servers by early next year, mainly because they don't support virtualization. I'm using virtualization to consolidate onto a smaller number of more powerful servers. Since the newer servers draw less power, it will keep me from having to buy additional UPS's.

 

[cyclone3d]

Well, I've been in IT for 30 years

The general rule I quote is to plan for systems to last 3 years, but try for 6. I still have some employee's using 8 year old 2.4Ghz P4's, and 5 year old dual core systems. They just run office and a couple really old apps (think Windows 95), which is fine with Windows 7 32 bit and 2GB - 4GB of ram.


We buy high end laptops for some of our technical users, and replace them every 2.5 to 3 years due to the heavy requirements. I re-image the old laptops, and hand them down to other users for another 3 years, or until they aren't worth repairing.

I still have a couple 8 year old servers in use, and several 7 year old servers. They've have no problems, and still work fine, so why replace them?
However, I will be phasing out the oldest servers by early next year, mainly because they don't support virtualization. I'm using virtualization to consolidate onto a smaller number of more powerful servers. Since the newer servers draw less power, it will keep me from having to buy additional UPS's.

Glad I am not one of your users.

Either that or your users don't do anything more than 3-4 page documents and must not do any actual demanding work.

 

[octoberasian]

In response to an earlier post, but to give you an idea the kind of issues a lot of employees like myself have had with these aging computers, I'll tell you. First, I don't know about the legality regarding the clock-in times for California, but our hours start from the time we clock in to the time we clock out. So,if we're late because of the computer, we're late.

Ok, the computers we have all have between 512MB to 1GB running Windows XP Pro. The reason for the disparity is that some locations and offices that we are in have different models of Dell PCs. As I said before, all have Socket 478 or Socket 775-era Celerons at no higher than 2.5GHz. All hard drives are 5400 rpm EIDE notebook drives. All kiosk computers save for maybe half a dozen are slim PC Dell computers with 512MB of RAM. They get very warm, very quickly within an hour of use. The branch offices use desktop form factor Dell workstation PCs, all Celerons with 1GB of RAM, but are also 5400rpm EIDE hard drives. All hard drives are between 20GB to 40GB in size.

The problem arises when we are in the middle of a tax return and the connection dies. If we are in one of the kiosks in Walmart, we use Sprint wireless broadband service and the reception is shitty. Hell, in many locations, the Walmart walkie-talkies will interfere with the connection and drop us whenever a Walmart employee passes by and talks into it. So, we have to do one of several things: Reconnect and wait 5 minutes for connection to be established; Close the connection client from Sprint and restart it which is another 1 to 2 min. to open and load (that's how slow the hard drives are); Or, fully restart the computer if the previous two didn't work. Just imagine how much time is wasted waiting for the computer to do just one thing. A simple tax return should take no more than 15 to 25 minutes; a complex tax return of either Schedule A deductions or self-employment earnings is 30 minutes to 2 hours at most. Now add 10 to 15 minutes for the computer to load fully if you had to restart the computer in the middle of a tax return to those times plus 3 to 5 minutes to connect online to the Sprint network.

The branch offices technically don't have this issue. At most we have between 3 to 5 working workstations with one workstation dedicated to handling the sole printer, credit/debit card processing, and software updates to the other workstations. If that goes down, and it has done it twice in the four years I've worked with this company, we cannot do any tax returns until it's fixed.

Whenever I'm the one opening the office, all the computers are to be turned on so we don't have to wait. The kiosks however don't have that luxury if you are the one to start the shift for that day. However, if anything goes wrong with the kiosk computers, we have no backups unlike the branch offices. We either try to fix it ourselves or call the main office to send someone over to fix the issue especially if it's a software problem.

These computers desperately need to be updated. Any problems we have, we waste a customer's time, and many do not want to be with a tax preparer longer than they should especially if the tax return isn't complicated to do. Memory and speed issues have become a problem especially if it takes a long time to load the website that processes our credit/debit cards with the tax software loaded along with the Sprint connection client. I have literally tried everything I could think of-- increase the swap file size to defragging the hard drive every week to cleaning out disk space (one computer had 10+ GB of files that was found by Disk Cleanup) to reverting to Classic Windows theme and disabling effects. Everything brought either minimal improvements or no improvements at all. The worst are the slim PC Dell workstations; once they get hot, they run a lot slower. And, we can't move them since they're bolt-locked underneath the desk in it's own metal cage.

 

[Thermite Paste]

Most of us would consider a C2D fine enough for basic office work. (Spreadsheets, queries, email, browser usage, telecommunications) It's just that most small businesses are using ancient software and hardware. (Win XP, carbon printer, socket A/LGA775 computer...etc)

It's quite sad that fixing an old computer and support hardware like that takes countless hours of knowledge and could be fixed just by buying new tech that won't break down as much when new.

My work is still using Pentium D boxes... and they made us put Windows 7 on them...

Granted it is a bit better than the P4 machines we somehow managed to convince them not to re-use.

 

[rigurat]

It's all we actually need in our work.

We use Pentium 4 2.5 GHz's with about 2 GB of RAM running good old Windows XP.

It's used for entering information (but no number crunching or data processing) and word processing.


In our work situation, running a high end triple monitor setup with 4 GPU's, an SSD, a high end CPU and double digit gigabytes of RAM is unlikely to provide benefit.

Well, perhaps an SSD in all of our computers would work, we only need 80 GB's of storage space in our computers anyway.

 

[JayteeBates]

I work at a large company and we refresh every 3 years. Frankly the last upgrade cycle was not a discernable upgrade in performance for everyday usage. They were smaller systems and probably used less power though.

For small business office users there really is no pressing need to upgrading past 2007/8 era machines. They really reached a point that the basic hardware at that time was good enough to do normal office tasks and will run Win7 just fine with enough ram. If its working its working. If a system died I wouldn't bother attempting to fix it just replace it with a new system.

 

[dgingeri]

Well, I've been in IT for 30 years

The general rule I quote is to plan for systems to last 3 years, but try for 6. I still have some employee's using 8 year old 2.4Ghz P4's, and 5 year old dual core systems. They just run office and a couple really old apps (think Windows 95), which is fine with Windows 7 32 bit and 2GB - 4GB of ram.


We buy high end laptops for some of our technical users, and replace them every 2.5 to 3 years due to the heavy requirements. I re-image the old laptops, and hand them down to other users for another 3 years, or until they aren't worth repairing.

I still have a couple 8 year old servers in use, and several 7 year old servers. They've have no problems, and still work fine, so why replace them?
However, I will be phasing out the oldest servers by early next year, mainly because they don't support virtualization. I'm using virtualization to consolidate onto a smaller number of more powerful servers. Since the newer servers draw less power, it will keep me from having to buy additional UPS's.

The biggest reason I say replace things after 5 years is due to reliability and support costs. Older systems do break down more often. Hard drives are the big thing, with a bathtub curve for failure rates. after 5 years, most hard drives enter into a phase where they quit working at a rate of higher than 10% per year. When a drive fails, work is lost. It takes time to reimage and get the system back up and going. The cost behind keeping older systems going is more a factor of the work by support techs than the actual parts. If a company has three techs and is using older equipment like that, then they could get by with two with newer equipment. If they have only one support tech, they could use an outside service and contract part time support with newer equipment. Newer equipment saves money, plain and simple.

Windows XP is a whole different story. XP costs up to ten times as much time for support than Windows 7. Win7 is a much more stable, protected, and secure platform than XP. The extra costs behind supporting XP could allow a company to eliminate half their support costs just by moving to it. On top of that, it won't be getting any more security updates after April 2014. XP is a time bomb waiting to go off these days. There's no good reason to keep running it, just excuses.

Performance isn't a major consideration, but it does play in there. Users can get more done when they aren't waiting on their systems, regardless of how uncomplicated their work may be. First off, older system have slower hard drives, and it takes longer to boot because of it. Many people don't complain about a system that takes 30 minutes to boot if that's all they've had, but it makes a huge difference when the system will boot in under three minutes. Actually working in Word or Excel doesn't require much performance, sure, but pulling documents up and saving them takes time, and the newer the system, the quicker that can be done. Email is much faster as well with a newer system. On top of all that, Windows Update takes forever and will monopolize an older system for upwards of 2 hours. Most users don't need the newer 3Ghz+ quad core processors, so buying new systems with dual core AMD A4 processors would be just fine. 1TB of hard drive space isn't even needed, but the faster transfer rates on the bigger drives these days make a huge difference in how things load, and also keep the storage performance more consistent, considering when a drive gets more than 2/3 full it can drop off as much as 50%.

With servers, all these factors are included, with a factor of five, plus the factor of having company wide services and data lost in cases of hard drive failure. Recently, I've had to deal with a glut of hard drive failure in my test lab. Our storage arrays, used to store test data copied to test servers to run tests on backup software, are just hitting 5 to 6 years old. I've had to replace a total of 36 hard drives this month alone. Over the summer, we're over 100. That's out of over 5000 drives, sure, but I have had two raid sets crash when multiple drives failed within a day. In both cases, a drive failed, starting a rebuild process to a hotspare, which caused the old, fragile drives to fail even further and faster. One set of RAID 5 1TB drives had two fail during the rebuild process, killing the set and losing the data. I'm nervous with our infrastructure because 17 VMs are sitting on a raid set of 16 750GB drives that are 7 years old. I split the drives into two sets of RAID 6 with two hotspares to keep it as safe as I could, with the VMs on one raid set and the backups on the second. We could still lose data if there were multiple drive failures. I would have to rebuild the 17 VMs, and I'd have to manually enter our 3000+ entry DNS table. I could rebuild the wiki server, but not the data it has gathered over the last twelve years. it would cost us weeks before I could get it back up.

In the end, it is all a matter of investment and return. By increasing spending on newer systems, support costs can be reduced significantly. Servers are more about security and risk. Keeping old servers and storage is risking company data and the ability of the company to stay in business. Investment in newer servers significantly reduces risk to a the company as a whole.

 

[next-Jin]

You can upgrade 5 PCs to modern standards for under a grand fairly easily so I'm not sure what the issue is for small business owners.

 

[next-Jin]

All that folks usually need are multiple monitors 4gb of ram and a 2008 era PC.

A SSD would work miracles in time essential work where data lookup is essential (switchboards, tech support centers, etc)

 

[Flyboat]

For some small business, they have one computer, one cash register, and one scanner. What is the point of replacing them every 3 years. They are costly to replace. These business do not have large cash reserve like big ones.

They spent a lot of money on software. For small business $5,000 is a big investment.

 

[cyclone3d]

For some small business, they have one computer, one cash register, and one scanner. What is the point of replacing them every 3 years. They are costly to replace. These business do not have large cash reserve like big ones.

They spent a lot of money on software. For small business $5,000 is a big investment.

From Dell, a decent NEW computer can be had for about $1,000.

That is not a lot to spend on a computer every 3-5 years. If they don't, then they are most likely going to be spending more than that on wasted time and service calls anyway.

If you own a company and are not making enough to keep your equipment up to date, then you might as well shut down since you are going to pretty much be starving anyway.

 

[Fenris_Ulf]

The two computers next to me are P4 machines that take about 15-20 minutes to boot. Clicking a link causes a 2-10 second pause while the HDD convulses in a spasm of activity. Opening a Word or PDF document is about 30 seconds. This all adds up to lots of lost productivity.

It really depends on what tasks your working on. Most office workers don't need much more than a C2D with a few gigs of RAM and a SSD. Store all work files on a server for easier backup, sharing, and accessability. Keep workstations clean of extraneous crap, and re-image to an updated baseline yearly. As PCs get more energy efficient, look to see what the energy costs are and what the benefits of a newer system will be, factored in these can be a significan savings. Anything over 5 years old I treat as failure waiting to happen - capacitors age, HDD and fan bearings fail, keyboards and mice wear, CCFLs on monitors get dimmer, heck, I've even had RAM go randomly bad after 5 years. Not saying some of this stuff can't be stretched further, but it may not be worth it, especially if it takes valuable data or work time with it.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

you guys are all being silly.

For the type of work 95% of people do a Pentium 4 is more than sufficient, provided they have dropped enough RAM in it to handle recent versions of software packages and OS'es.

I agree with the sentiment that it costs more to keep old hardware alive (at least in the case of laptops, as in most cases desktops just don't die) but there is no reason to rush out and replace the hardware until it DOES die if it is still doing the job just fine.

Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Outlook... These things don't need more than a few hundred Mhz from a CPU. There is no need what so ever to have the latest and greatest.

 

[Qinsp]

Windows Disease is the only reason to replace dedicated machines.

We have a $8k large format digitizer. The computer that services it only has XP and the digitizer driver.

As of yesterday, I have to replace it. It has gotten so slow (10 minute boot. 5 minutes to load driver) that it is impeding work.

If your machine spends it's time on the internet, or running 64 bit software, you need to upgrade. But if it is a "cruncher", it should never HAVE to be replaced, but eventually Windows will bring it to it's knees. We have 2 DOS machines running that run as fast as they did 18 years ago.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

The two computers next to me are P4 machines that take about 15-20 minutes to boot. Clicking a link causes a 2-10 second pause while the HDD convulses in a spasm of activity. Opening a Word or PDF document is about 30 seconds. This all adds up to lots of lost productivity.

It really depends on what tasks your working on. Most office workers don't need much more than a C2D with a few gigs of RAM and a SSD. Store all work files on a server for easier backup, sharing, and accessability. Keep workstations clean of extraneous crap, and re-image to an updated baseline yearly. As PCs get more energy efficient, look to see what the energy costs are and what the benefits of a newer system will be, factored in these can be a significan savings. Anything over 5 years old I treat as failure waiting to happen - capacitors age, HDD and fan bearings fail, keyboards and mice wear, CCFLs on monitors get dimmer, heck, I've even had RAM go randomly bad after 5 years. Not saying some of this stuff can't be stretched further, but it may not be worth it, especially if it takes valuable data or work time with it.

Agreed. Even a P4 though, can do the job just fine, if equipped with enough RAM. Old computers are usually only slow in most tasks because RAM requirements grow over time.

These wouldn't be good gaming rigs by any stretch of imagination, but for Office/Email machines, even a 10 year old computer with enough RAM is fine and won't have any noticeable slowdowns.

Two jobs ago, I had a P4 based desktop. Had no issues with it at all. Really didn't feel any slower than a modern machine would.

Last year at Xmas I refurbished my sisters Pentium D laptop. Maxed out the ram and put an SSD in it. For what she does, it is faster than all of her friends newer computers now.


There comes a time when computers are more costly to maintain than they are worth, but they don't just stop being decent computers overnight.

Basic office work does't require much more CPU today than it did 15 years ago. it does -however - require more RAM, and th ebiggest issue IMHO with older computers is maxing out the RAM on them.

 

[Qinsp]

From Dell, a decent NEW computer can be had for about $1,000.

That is not a lot to spend on a computer every 3-5 years. If they don't, then they are most likely going to be spending more than that on wasted time and service calls anyway.

If you own a company and are not making enough to keep your equipment up to date, then you might as well shut down since you are going to pretty much be starving anyway.

From experience as a small business. Don't buy shrink wrap computers for work. There is too much crapware preloaded, and they often have proprietary parts inside.

Use good parts, and build naked. They last a lot longer, run faster, and are faster/easier/cheaper to repair.

For home? Fine.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

IMHO, there are only two reasons to replace anything P4 or newer for the typical office user.

1.) Motherboard doesn't support at least 4GB of RAM.

New OS:es, service packs and versions always use more RAM. 4GB is a must for clients today. If the board doesn't support it it has to go.

2.) It's starting to become sufficiently failure prone that it isn't worth maintaining.

This tends to happen more to laptops than desktops as they get banged around a lot. Desktops - unless they contain a design flaw, like failing VRM's) tend to last forever.


All most old computers need to function fine for today's office is a RAM upgrade and a fresh Windows install.

Pretty much any x86 CPU released in the last 15 years would do just fine

 

[J So]

FWIW my old PC was a C2D E6300 and it was slow as a dog with the applications we run. I got a new computer early last year and it's a Sandy 2500 and it made a huge difference.

 

[pcjunkie]

3-5 year rule is a ridiculous waste of money with today's workstations (C2D or better) that should last from 5-8 years with a modern OS. I take it some of you have never had an IT budget...servers are another matter all together. If we have a need and can justify the cost then we will do it.

 

[Ryokurin]

3-5 year rule is a ridiculous waste of money with today's workstations (C2D or better) that should last from 5-8 years with a modern OS. I take it some of you have never had an IT budget...servers are another matter all together. If we have a need and can justify the cost then we will do it.

Ok, so lets assume that you purchased a $400 computer in 2008 and you've done no upgrades to it since. That would be a Pentium E2180, 2gb, 300gb drive, Geforce 7100 and a generic mainboard.

Lets say you now have to put Windows 7 on it, so $199+$70 for 4gb of memory. You can't use the old memory because the board only had slots for 2. You are within $131 of what you paid for the original system. ? What happens if say you didn't notice the bad caps and a month from now it dies from the new added stress? That memory is DDR2 so you can't take it to a new system, and 775 boards are hard to find. You've just wasted a lot of money.

Or, you could buy a Dell Inspiron 660 for $300, or build a new PC with an i3, 4gb and Windows 7 for $400, which will likely stay trouble free for a couple of years, or would be covered by a warranty. Not to mention you can then start writing off it's depreciation on taxes again.

 

[pcjunkie]

Ok, so lets assume that you purchased a $400 computer in 2008 and you've done no upgrades to it since. That would be a Pentium E2180, 2gb, 300gb drive, Geforce 7100 and a generic mainboard.

Lets say you now have to put Windows 7 on it, so $199+$70 for 4gb of memory. You can't use the old memory because the board only had slots for 2. You are within $131 of what you paid for the original system. ? What happens if say you didn't notice the bad caps and a month from now it dies from the new added stress? That memory is DDR2 so you can't take it to a new system, and 775 boards are hard to find. You've just wasted a lot of money.

Or, you could buy a Dell Inspiron 660 for $300, or build a new PC with an i3, 4gb and Windows 7 for $400, which will likely stay trouble free for a couple of years, or would be covered by a warranty. Not to mention you can then start writing off it's depreciation on taxes again.

All of our 2008+ pc's come with 4GB of memory (future proofing), not that Windows 7 needed it and we bought bulk Windows 7 Pro licenses cheaper with our own KMS. And from 2010 on every one came with Win 7 anyway. People keep making the mistake that every 3-5 years you replace every pc in the company, that's not so as many are purchased as needed by departments in different years. More of rolling upgrades. Our depreciation is set for 5 years so another one or two years of service can add up to big savings. We use Dell and by the time the 3 year maintenance contract is up, with no issues you can pretty much guarantee it will last a few more years. If they are lemons most of the time problems show up sooner rather than later. Mostly its hard drives that fail if anything, and not many of those at all. With the right experience comes knowing when to spend and when not too.

 

[Ryokurin]

I don't think anyone was saying that you replace every system every 5 years bar none, just that after 3 to 5 years you are often better off buying new instead of trying to fix or upgrade the old one. Often the people who are so dead set on keeping their old one running are just tightwads that will complain either way because they just think it will run forever.

 

[Sufu]

3-5 year rule is a ridiculous waste of money with today's workstations (C2D or better) that should last from 5-8 years with a modern OS. I take it some of you have never had an IT budget...servers are another matter all together. If we have a need and can justify the cost then we will do it.

What the hell, who wants to run a C2D? No it's not fine. You try to run two browsers with 5+ tabs each, then run excel, office and outlook, plus business web apps, and if you work in IT, that means topping it off with things like wireshark and securecrt. Next thing you know, you have 20+ apps going on at once on two monitors.

If you all you do is browse the web, fine stick with a C2D. But a 4 year old PC just slows everything down, wastes like half of your workday while you wait for it to load a damn app.

5-8 years is just ridiculous. Have you used a Pentium 4 recently? Try using it for a week for business work, see how that works out for ya.

 

[heatlesssun]

What the hell, who wants to run a C2D? No it's not fine. You try to run two browsers with 5+ tabs each, then run excel, office and outlook, plus business web apps, and if you work in IT, that means topping it off with things like wireshark and securecrt. Next thing you know, you have 20+ apps going on at once on two monitors.

If you all you do is browse the web, fine stick with a C2D. But a 4 year old PC just slows everything down, wastes like half of your workday while you wait for it to load a damn app.

5-8 years is just ridiculous. Have you used a Pentium 4 recently? Try using it for a week for business work, see how that works out for ya.

A C2D would be okay for a lot of common work tasks but C2D performance is about on par with today's Bay Trail Atoms, the slowest x86 CPUs that are now running the cheapest Windows 8 tablets and hybrids. That's probably not exactly the most ideal platform for heavier workloads. However Core i7 platforms, the oldest now which are 5 years old, can still do some heavy lifting, especially with SSDs and a solid GPU.

 

[Qinsp]

IIRC, the AMD quad was launched over 5 years ago? It is still relevant.
Even with DDR2 RAM, it can multitask pretty good. Not a slug, even today, if you built them correctly. Run 2 monitors, Office, Acrobat, CAD, Video microscope capture, and not skip a beat.

Including two 27" 1920x1200 monitors, about $1500 a seat with XP Pro.

 

[/dev/null]

I just convinced a writer I know, online only, who was complaining about his ancient pc, to accept a FREE PC from me.

OLD PC: pentium 4 2.0 (or 2.4), 512M ram, XP
My donated PC: Pentium E5800, 2G ram, Xubuntu, 64G ssd.

Can't wait until he turns it on....after hitting the boot sector, the pc boots in 10-15 seconds.

 

[brinstar117]

I think a lot of this can be attributed to human nature. When someone has to approve upgrading or replacing PC hardware they only see one lump sum. It's harder for them to see the smaller less tangible losses and inefficiencies by keeping the old hardware.

A long time ago when Pentium 4's were still cutting edge I worked at a Fortune 500 company that was still using a 386 desktop as a dedicated stand alone tag printing terminal. It was running Windows 3.1 and to its credit worked pretty well but was beat up and dirty.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

FWIW my old PC was a C2D E6300 and it was slow as a dog with the applications we run. I got a new computer early last year and it's a Sandy 2500 and it made a huge difference.

What kind of applications do you run?

For any amount of browsing and office an CD2 would be more than fine. I suspect what you were noticing as slow had more to do with amount of RAM and drive speed than anything else.

Today's CPU's sit mostly idle even while in active use, as what most people do doesn't come even close to challenging them.

As I am typing this in my web browser with ~10 other tabs open, as well as Excel, Powerpoint, Lync, a couple of word instances, some dedicated business apps and Outlook humming in the background, the highest CPU utilization I saw was 4%, on an Ivy Core i5-3320M @ 2.6Ghz.

This suggests to me that even if this CPU were only running at 100Mhz, it would probably be fine (until I tried to open up a Youtube video).

This doesn't mean that there aren't usage scenarios that DO require more recent CPU's. Compiling code, scientific number crunching, video editing, encoding operations, music creation, etc. etc. can all benefit from higher speced machines, but the truth is, this represents a minuscule minority of all PC uses. I'd guess less than 0.1%

Most people do office and email. That's it. And for that, any old CPU will do, provided you can find a motherboard that will fit enough RAM for modern OS:es.


There are practical maintenance cost and financial reasons for upgrading, as mentioned by others here, but from a basic need perspective, faster CPU's are just a silly waste, and I doubt very much many organizations are being held back by their aging PC's.

 

[teh_chem]

I use a P9300-based Dell laptop at my company. It's a 5 year old laptop, not new by any means. It's had zero maintenance issues. I do some fairly complex things with it (Matlab, image analysis/processing, etc.--beyond 'standard' office/outlook tasks). Only weakness is the RAM, and that's dirt-cheap to upgrade. Of course my home computer is light-years faster, but this work laptop doesn't cause any lost productivity. 'Old' computers are just fine for tons of things, there's no lost productivity unless ALL you do ALL DAY is hardware-intensive computer work; and if that's the case, no one is going to be giving you a 10 year old computer to use, and Intel's whole argument is fairly moot.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

I use a P9300-based Dell laptop at my company. It's a 5 year old laptop, not new by any means. It's had zero maintenance issues. I do some fairly complex things with it (Matlab, image analysis/processing, etc.--beyond 'standard' office/outlook tasks). Only weakness is the RAM, and that's dirt-cheap to upgrade. Of course my home computer is light-years faster, but this work laptop doesn't cause any lost productivity. 'Old' computers are just fine for tons of things, there's no lost productivity unless ALL you do ALL DAY is hardware-intensive computer work; and if that's the case, no one is going to be giving you a 10 year old computer to use, and Intel's whole argument is fairly moot.

Exactly.

It may not be cost effective to have an IT staff paid to upgrade and repair old failing computers (new computers tend to be cheaper than hiring more people to maintain old computers) but there is nothing wrong with keeping them until they start running into trouble.