I know that spending money is usually not the best way to save money. My wife is a habitual coupon clipper, and she frequently proclaims “I saved $xx today!” To which I usually reply “But you had to spend $xxx so you didn’t really ‘save‘ anything.” Now that I think about it maybe this is why she never buys the stuff I ask for…

Let’s take a typical small office with 4-5 year old computers on each desk. They work and they’re paid for, so the boss is happy. However those older computers are costing you more than you bargained for.

Reason #1: Power Consumption

A typical desktop computer from 4 years ago can use more electricity when switched on than a 100 Watt light bulb, even when just sitting idle. If you leave your computers on 24/7 that’s over $120 per year in electricity. If you have an old CRT (fishbowl) monitor that’s another 120 Watts on average. Even a relatively modern flat panel screen uses around 30 Watts.

So let’s say that you have 10 of those computers and you turn off your screens each evening to save electricity. In that example you would be spending $1800 per year just in electricity to run them! And that’s not counting the extra cost in air conditioning caused by all the extra heat those computers generate.

New computers can use less electricity and generate less heat. For example I just built a new server for my office. I went all out to make sure it would use as little power as possible since it would be running 24/7/365. That server only uses 23 Watts of power, which is less than half the power I use for my desktop monitors alone.

Reason #2: Time = Money

You probably pay your employees by the hour to get stuff done, right? So you don’t want them sitting around waiting for their computers to do stuff.

There are endless Return On Investment (ROI) studies on how much time employees spend sitting and waiting for computers to respond. Here’ s just one example from Intel touting the savings found just by using their hard drives:

Obviously there are more variables to this sort of thing than you could possibly compute, but this table illustrates that even a 1 or 2 second improvement in the amount of time required to do things can translate into BIG savings when multiplied over a few years time.

Reason #3: Old Windows = New Viruses

Look back at my post on virus infections. One thing I didn’t talk too much about then is the fact that Windows XP is much more prone to virus infections than Windows Vista or Windows 7. Microsoft took a beating by the security community and made big changes when they created Windows 7. The result is that Windows 7 stands a much better chance of resisting virus attacks than Windows XP. And considering it costs $120 on average to clean up a virus, PLUS all the downtime, it makes sense to avoid that problem as much as possible.

The sum is greater than the parts

When you add all the cost savings together, buying new computers could pay for themselves in just a year or two and start saving you money from then forward. Until those computers too are “old”.

Need help picking the right systems? Call us and we’ll get you going in the right direction.

A week doesn’t go by that someone doesn’t call us to help clean up a virus from their computer.  We’re happy to help them, after all that’s how we make money. But we’d rather that our friends didn’t get viruses at all.

The answer is straightforward.  In *every* case the computers we have cleaned were either using some sort of free antivirus or had a paid antivirus with an expired subscription.  The short answer is that if you didn’t pay for antivirus in the last year then you’re vulnerable.

We’ve done many hours of research to determine the best antivirus products for your PC.  What most people don’t know is that independent testing organizations test the major antivirus programs for effectiveness as well as impact on your computer’s performance.  We looked for vendors that consistently ranked at the top of the test results, year after year.

We recommend these antivirus products:

Kaspersky Antivirus
ESET NOD32 Antivirus Several recent testing labs have shown significant failures in NOD32 and so we can no longer recommend it. Sorry ESET. [edit 1/27/2011]

Both are equally effective at cleaning, detecting and preventing infections.  ESET NOD32 is a little better at running faster, while Kaspersky has an easier to use interface.  Either one will keep you safe and will keep your money out of our hands!