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How Much is Your Old Computer Costing You?

Today I worked on the system of a client who reported the computer was crashing. After briefly examining the logs, I found that the system had been reporting hard drive failures… for nearly a year.

The system was crashing with the infamous Blue Screen of Death, and running terrifically slow. Given that the computer itself was 6 years old, slow was to be expected, but this was slow. It took many minutes just to get to the logon prompt, longer to get to rendering a desktop, etc.

So, I had to ask myself, “how much is this costing them?” Let’s do a quick calculation:

An employee uses this PC, and sits at the machine for approximately 4 hours a day out of a typical 8 hour workday. For round numbers, let’s say that said employee costs the company $25/hour (after salary, benefits, taxes, etc.). Let’s also be generous and say that the machine was taking 25% longer to perform all tasks, on average. In reality, it was probably taking much longer, but let’s err on the low side.

So 4 hours at the desk, and 25% (1 hour) of that is wasted waiting for the PC. $25 a day * 5 days a week = $125 / week. Multiply this times 50 weeks out of the year and we can easily make the case that this slowness cost our client $6,250 a year in lost employee productivity.

And that was just one computer…

Cost of a new computer, installed, with a new software suite and employee training? Significantly less.

How much money are you and your staff wasting by not upgrading your old computer?

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