Standard PC Lifecycle

Gartner resource T-14-5378 Desktop Recommendations, and T-13-8045 Desktop PC Life.

Gartner at present rates PC Life Span at 4 years while IDC has reduced its recommendation to 3.

I have typically found it is about two weeks longer than the warranty. ;)

Here's a pretty good evaluation that was done:

http://www.dir.state.tx.us/eod/pc/pc-cycle.pdf

Good luck...

One other thing you may need to take into consideration is how your company depreciates capital equipment. This method is approved by the IRS and is not easily changed. Your company's financial wizards may not let you replace your computers every 3 or 4 years if it is depreciated over a longer period. In my company, (all) capital assets are depreciated over a 5-year period. This makes it difficult to sell a reasonable computer life-cycle plan.

You need to consider the suggestions from both Alpha-Male and Tim along with how the PC is used.

If your company does a lot of high end processing (such as CAD or graphics) these PCs may have only a 1 year "productive" life before they are inefficient for the user to operate.

With the typical 5 year depreciation plans, your best option is to "trickle down" the PCs from the users that require constant upgrading until the PC is depreciated.

At the last 2 places where I worked, PC life was until the cost of repair exceeded the value of the PC.

At my present job, we are still using some 286 PCs because they are sufficient for the task.
Since we use a lot of custom code, it can be very expensive to upgrade a PC should the code not function with the new hardware and CPU speeds.

Chas

This question was closed by the author