Windows & Desktop Support - Business Guide 

This really starts to effect businesses above 5 PC's. Having different operating systems, different versions of office, differing hardware because they were all purchased at different times is a recipe for lots of expensive support calls. Standardise your environment, and document it. This will eliminate an enormous cost to your business.

When buying your computers, buy them all at the same time. Make them all the same, it will really simplify your operations. Also establish a relationship with a single provider if possible.

Your best bet is to have a look at our IT maintenance agreement, for business in the Adelaide metro area. This product standardise's your environment and ensures downtime is kept to a minimum.

We rarely come across a business that actually forecasts their IT budget over a 2 or 3 year period. We initially took this to mean that most business owners like to live life on the edge and enjoy last minute expensive bills and find happiness in making strategic business decisions while their server is in bits on the floor. In other words pushed into a corner and forced to spend money on the hardware.

With our IT maintenance solution, recommended IT forecasts are included and updated on a yearly basis, this way you can budget for when you know you are going to need to replace equipment rather than being forced to make a decision under pressure.

As a rough guide for a business PC, you should look to replace it every three years, some can get 4 years use from them, but employee productivity is reduced and support calls increase substantially in the fourth year.

A standard small business server should be planned to be replaced every four to five years.

Aim to replace equipment when the warranty runs out which is usually around every three years.

As can be seen above, we don't go too much into RAM or hard disks, or talk about quad core technology, what we are trying to do is make the business community in Adelaide make the right choice with their hardware decisions instead of the cheap choice. The best decision would be to become a managed service client of ours, however failing that, if you can walk away with some pointers from this article and practice them, then its all been worth while.