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During the spring, I received a call from a new prospect that was interested in seeing how I could help them. After they explained the problem, my heart sank. This customer had been running their entire business on a Dell computer that was purchased in 1996.

This computer, in 1996, was top notch – it had plenty of memory and hard drive space. In 2007, however, Windows NT 3.51 and a Pentium 2 processor make this an old computer. A very old computer. For that matter, we don’t even support Windows 95 anymore – Windows NT 3.51 came out in 1993!

They did not want to upgrade because they had spent $4000 on this computer in 1996 – their reason for calling me was the hard drive crashed and needed to restore data from it.

Fortunately, I was able to take the hard drive out of their old computer and install it in a newer computer and restore all of their data – another disaster avoided.

Here is what I told them and this is a good rule of thumb; computers that are 5 years old or older need to be replaced. The cost of a new computer nowadays is the lowest it has ever been. It’s not worth your time (or ours) or your money to keep old computers running. While I realize it is an extra expense, the problems that come along with old computers, or even old technology, will take your business down for longer periods of time.

Don’t feel like you should replace your computers every year, but think about instituting a ’3-year replacement’ rule, where you replace one computer every 3 years. This way you don’t break the bank, have less problem computers and will limit the about of downtime in your business.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Helpful Tips, News, True Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.