When to refresh a laptop fleet, and when not to

Most fleets are refreshed by age. Every machine over three years old is replaced, in a batch, in whatever quarter has budget. It is easy to administer and it replaces a lot of perfectly good hardware while leaving some genuinely bad hardware in place because it is only two years old.

What actually makes a laptop due

• The operating system is leaving support. This is the only hard deadline. A machine that cannot run a supported OS is a security problem regardless of how well it works, and the date is published years ahead.
• Battery health under 60%. Reported by the OS. A laptop that lasts ninety minutes is a desktop with a handle, and a battery replacement is often the cheaper fix on a machine that is otherwise sound.
• 8 GB of memory on a machine used for anything beyond email. The browser alone now uses most of it. Where the memory can be upgraded, that is a twenty-minute job; where it is soldered, the machine is due.
• A spinning disk. Any laptop still on a hard disk rather than an SSD is slow in a way its user has stopped noticing and everybody around them has not. An SSD swap transforms it for the price of a keyboard.
• Repairs exceeding a third of replacement. A cracked screen on a four-year-old machine is the end of it. The same screen on a one-year-old machine is a repair.

What does not make a laptop due

Being three years old. Being slower than the newest one in the office. Having a scuffed lid. A four-year-old business laptop with an SSD, 16 GB and a good battery is a fine machine for most work, and replacing it buys nothing except a warranty.

Refresh the people, not the batch

Replacing the whole fleet at once means the whole fleet is due again at once, in the same quarter, forever. Spread it. Replace the machines that fail the tests above as they fail them, and the fleet's age spreads out into a rolling third or quarter a year — which is also a budget line that stays the same size.

Buy for the job, in two or three shapes

One specification for most staff, one for the people who run heavy software, and possibly a rugged one for anybody who works out of a van. Not one per person. Three shapes means spares are interchangeable and a failed machine is swapped from stock in an hour rather than ordered.

Warranty matters more than speed

A business laptop with next-business-day on-site cover for three years costs more than a consumer machine with return-to-base. The difference is whether a failed screen is a day of downtime or a fortnight. On a fleet of forty, one of them fails every couple of months; that is the number to price against.

What happens to the old ones

Wipe them — a real erase, not a delete — and keep a record of the serial and the date. A laptop that leaves the business with last year's accounts on it is a data-protection incident waiting for somebody to find it at a car-boot sale. Certified disposal costs almost nothing per unit and produces the certificate an auditor asks for.