How do you afford to replace your computers on an ongoing basis?

[kennysarmy]

Working on my budget submission for 25/26.

 

Our total PC number is around 840 and previously we've kept around 70 low usage devices out of warranty, and replaced all other's when their 5 year warranty comes to an end. This meant purchasing around 150 new each year and by doing this we kept the out of warranty % around 8% 

 

Now budgets are tight I'm going to look at keeping around 120 devices out of warranty and replacing 1/6th of those remaining, giving a replacement number each year of 120.

 

If my analysis is correct this gives us in the region of this % of PC's out of warranty each year.

 

25/26 31%

26/27 29%

27/28 38%

28/29 38%

29/30 25%

30/31 29%

 

Not ideal compared to what we're used to, but how does it compare to others?

 

Thanks.

 

 

[PotNoodleTech]

Just take the total value of your equipment that needs replacing and divide by the number of years your gonna keep it going.

 

E.g. 840 * 300 / 7 = 36000

 

So your gonna need 36,000 a year approx ot keep your fleet running.  And that's just PC base units!

 

Now youve got a figure you can warn them that if they start giving you £20k a year it's obvious that things are gonna go down hill.

Edited April 8, 2025 by PotNoodleTech

[synaesthesia]

I think this is a similar theme across schools - so many are told because of various schemes of varying quality and sense including RPA insurance, cybersecurity etc that they MUST have rolling replacement programs in place, MUST use the latest and greatest, MUST be warrantied, whilst all at the same time being blissful ignorant of one cold, hard fact.

We can't always afford to.

Our expertise in keeping things running, keeping them fit for purpose, keeping them safe & secure does not always tally with these schemes and the powers that be will all too often only take what the scheme providers tell them as gospel but they're often in a tough position too, they're not always IT experts and have to judge what's best to do. And when a carrot is being held in front of them like "You won't be compliant..." they are easily swayed.

That's a harsh outlook from my perspective only of course, but based on multiple real experiences

We're in a lucky position as I've been able to finagle things based on Windows 10 going EOL this year, so our warranties for client equipment doesn't hit us for a couple of years, anything bought in the last 2 years has at least 5 year warranties on, including refurbs but forecasts I've put together for our finance department show not too dissimilar figures. You're lucky in that you have a nicely spread timeline - people that replace all in one go end up with a large bill every 3-5 years, however with foresight that shouldn't come as a surprise and would hope has been budgeted for. (To the best of ability anyway - school budgets let alone department budgets are as fluid as a nose-blow in a swimming pool!)

 

[ITGuyNW]

49 minutes ago, PotNoodleTech said:

Just take the total value of your equipment that needs replacing and divide by the number of years your gonna keep it going.

 

E.g. 840 * 300 / 7 = 36000

 

So your gonna need 36,000 a year approx ot keep your fleet running.  And that's just PC base units!

 

Now youve got a figure you can warn them that if they start giving you £20k a year it's obvious that things are gonna go down hill.

 

This is the position I'm in.

 

Had a big meeting last year, gave them the numbers which showed I needed double to keep on top of things and now I've found my budget for this next year has gone down at least 25%. On top of PC bases there's other things like servers (and maintenance), infrastructure, wifi, cctv, even our UPS needs battery replacements this year. but oh well.

[dhicks]

1 hour ago, kennysarmy said:

previously we've kept around 70 low usage devices out of warranty, and replaced all other's when their 5 year warranty comes to an end.

We tend to go by OS update availability, which gives us around 7 years usage for most hardware. That probably doesn't help very much as equipment still needs to be replaced at some point.

[ThatBoringBloke]

Two words - Second hand.

Decent spec 2nd hand pc's at a fraction of their cost when new. I then try and stretch them out to 5-6 years of life.

We are predominantly Chromebooks though and for those I'll always look to buy new. We are looking to cut back on numbers though as Covid provided us with a LOT of devices. 

[drutt]

We've started buying refurb kit in areas where it makes sense, like Sixth Form or Support Staff.

 

We gave up on extended warranties for student and staff kit years ago, the last one we bought was probably 2015. It just didn't make financial sense when keyboard damage or broken screens would void it almost immediately, other than a spate of broken USB-C charging ports that put us off buying anything that has just USB-C charging with laptops, we generally don't get other hardware problems where the extended warranty would make sense, and we have stuff from 2016.

 

• We refreshed our servers and SAN in 2022-23 F/Y (replacing kit from 2015), warranties for those are due this coming financial year and we'll go for a 3rd party break fix option to keep costs down.
• We did WiFi in 2023-24 F/Y, stayed with Aruba but replaced our hardware controller and went with the virtual controller and very happy with it and performance
• Firewall and endpoint security with broadband is locked in until 2028
• Switches are around 10 years old but happy with their performance and we invested in a 10GB backbone originally so no real need to refresh anytime soon.

We do most repairs ourselves in house, this obviously means lots of time during holidays spent repairing keyboards and screens if needed. We're hoping to get a computer suite (or three) over the next few years as we find vandalism and damage happens more often with laptops than desktops, and generally desktops are cheaper and less time intensive to repair.

 

This also doesn't consider the benefit of the teacher being able to just walk into a room, turn the computers on and ideally have kids working in 5 minutes, rather than the current process of booking a laptop trolley, collecting the key and then going to get the laptops with a class group of students. Then repeating this process at the end of the lesson in reverse.

[localzuk]

5 years is honestly too short of a life expectancy for desktop PCs. My goal is to move to more "standard" PCs - move away from the Dell Optiplexs and move to ones with standard motherboards, PSUs etc... That way, warranty doesn't really matter long term - if a mobo dies, £50 and you can swap it out.

 

That said, the other key part is buying the right spec machines up front. I have seen a lot of schools buying lower power devices like i3s or worse, and its honestly a bad trade-off. An i5 will happily last 10 years for normal use - at my last job, I had machines that were 12 years old that we only replaced because of physical damage.

[synaesthesia]

1 hour ago, localzuk said:

5 years is honestly too short of a life expectancy for desktop PCs. My goal is to move to more "standard" PCs - move away from the Dell Optiplexs and move to ones with standard motherboards, PSUs etc... That way, warranty doesn't really matter long term - if a mobo dies, £50 and you can swap it out.

 

That said, the other key part is buying the right spec machines up front. I have seen a lot of schools buying lower power devices like i3s or worse, and its honestly a bad trade-off. An i5 will happily last 10 years for normal use - at my last job, I had machines that were 12 years old that we only replaced because of physical damage.

This ^^^ - adding to what I was saying about people doing things a certain way to satisfy these 3rd parties, too many schools/trusts just find it easier on paper to stick with the "big brands" "But our account manager can get us a great deal on HP, Dell or Lenovo!!"

Yup, how about parts? HP who give with one hand providing some of the best self-repair guides I've seen outside of iFixit thanks to Right to Repair, take by making sure you can only ever update the firmware of that SAN if you pay for a support package the second it's out of what they deem serviceable period. Dell seem to be half way inbetween and Lenovo no longer have a clue what "quality" means until you hit the "If you want a price, call us" price point.

Thankfully refurbs see us well through the worst of those but it certainly makes the Stones and Very's extremely attractive options. If you have one of those particularly sorts of SLT/finance however and they see "Random Brand I've Never Heard of before" and "Dell", they're going to Optiplex all the way to a purchase order. Hopefully there's a bit more trust!

[DrCheese]

1 hour ago, localzuk said:

That way, warranty doesn't really matter long term - if a mobo dies, £50 and you can swap it out.

 

ish..... We've thought this before but getting older motherboards is not that simple.

We ended up having to replace both CPU/Motherboard & ram in some 8th gen computers that had a USB flaw on the motherboard with 13th gen equipment.

They were out of warranty & in a built in desk setup so we had no choice.

 

We also had some other computers under warranty with the same motherboard that the vendor was able to replace, but it took an awful lot of work/headache getting them to confirm the flaw & fix. Then extra delays whilst they sourced parts.

 

Sourcing our own 8th gen motherboards for either setup was prohibitively expensive & definitely not possible at scale - We would have ended up with rooms with a boatload of different mobos/vendors to support & all of varying quality/condition. We try to keep an IT suite (Where possible) with all the same hardware/age.

 

I had the same with my brother in laws PC with his motherboard dying - It just wasn't worth the cost as any second hand kit had flown up in price.

 

I've become very "tier 1 vendor ONLY" in my mindset nowadays, yes you can build your own kit for cheaper but the TCO is just not worth it.

If we have a Dell motherboard go, it doesn't matter the age its' usually very simple to get replacements cheaply. Drivers, support and so on just saves so many headaches.

 

To answer OP tho - We've done the same as other posters when it comes to second hand PCs - Buy some Dell/HP devices on the cheap from ICT Direct. Meant we could move a whole bunch of support staff up to Windows 11 where as if we'd waited until we could afford new, It would have been much longer & we wouldn't have been able to do them all.

 

 

 

Edited April 8, 2025 by DrCheese