The Top Reasons You Should Have a Spare Computer

Here at Upward, we’re all about making your life easier through technology. And one primary way we try to do this is by building contingency plans for all of our customers such as offering offsite backup services and cloud-based network storage. But on top keeping your data safe, what else can we do to ensure that your employees have access to the technology they need 24/7? Well, how about having a contingency plan for when one of your workstations suddenly goes down or needs heavy maintenance? If you haven’t considered having a spare laptop or desktop on hand at your place of business, here’s why you should make the investment:

What are the three top reasons every office should have a spare computer?

• Your computer suddenly dies.
  • Computers tend to last about 3 years before they start to have mechanical issues. At that point, the extended warranty expires, and we have found components start to give out and computers can suddenly fail. There are also accidents, where employees will spill a cup of coffee on their computer, or environmental damage like a power spike or burst pipe.
• You have a sudden new hire.
  • You’ve had a sales boom and you need to onboard new staff in a hurry. You haven’t placed an order for a new workstation though. We normally will still need the full 2 weeks to order the gear, and build the new computer. But if you had a spare around the new employee would be able to use the spare while you wait for a new one to arrive.
• A spare can create some nice flexibility in your network.
  • If your spare is a laptop, that will give added flexibility to your network. You would be able to take this computer to an offsite meeting for a presentation or give it to an employee who is going to work from home. Spares can also act as shared workstations, like a conference room, or lunchroom PC.

The process is easy to have Upward get your office a spare:

We would purchase a spare, either a desktop or laptop and pre-configure the computer for your environment. We would add it to the domain, and have the computer ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. This also means installing any company-specific software and network security standards. This process would allow any user to log into this machine and start working immediately. So basically, there’s no headache. We’d take care of everything and if a user went down in your environment, they could be back up in minutes.

How much would you end up saving if your office had a spare computer?

There are two ways having a spare could benefit a customer financially.

• The first relates to inventory and shipping cost. If we are purchasing a spare, we can buy the machine locally, and wait until we find a good deal on the hardware. That could easily translate to upwards of $100-$200 in savings if purchasing through us.
• The second relates to the amount that downtime could cost a company. Our general turnaround time on a new PC is 2 weeks from the moment we purchase, to the end user sitting down and using their new computer. If a computer goes down, that could mean a user would have either limited or no access to their computer while we configure the new PC. If this were a critical PC in the environment, like shipping/front desk/CEO/Sales, that employee’s downtime would directly relate to a loss in profit for the company. You could be looking at saving thousands if your employees have a way to get right back to work if they are having computer problems.

  Where should a company keep their spare computer? And how often should they turn it on to keep it updated?

  Spares should be kept in the server room, or IT area. Somewhere they will be easily accessible to be set up at a moment’s notice, but also secure. Best practice would be to pull a spare out and plug it into the network once a month to run updates.

Think you need to talk more about this process or other ways Upward can help save your company money with a comprehensive IT plan? Contact us today!