Wouldn’t it be nice if your computer hardware took care of itself? Maybe someday, but for now, your equipment is depending on you to schedule its vacation or retirement. Ignoring maintenance and upgrades or letting them slide until you have more time is not a good idea. That is flirting with disaster, especially when business-critical processes are involved.

All small businesses should develop and follow a hardware upgrade and maintenance schedule.

Building a Schedule

Begin with a blank spreadsheet. Create a column listing everyone in your company who has a computer. Record the serial number of each person’s workstation in the next column.

Websites of most major manufacturers have a function that lets you enter hardware serial numbers and find the manufacturing and warranty expiration dates. Add these dates and your date of purchase to your schedule. Now you have an official company hardware upgrade and maintenance schedule.

Next, create a column with the dates on which you plan to replace your hardware. These are the general rules of thumb:

• Replace servers every five years.
• Replace workstations (desktops) every five to six years.
• Replace laptops every three to five years depending on degree of wear and tear.
• Replace printers and monitors when they stop working or technological advances make it worthwhile to invest in new ones.

Hardware replacement can strain budgets if not carefully planned, so try to stagger your workstation purchases. For example, if you have 10 desktops, replace two per year to avoid a major expenditure all at once. And anytime you upgrade servers, be ready to increase your tech support budget, too. Server upgrades take time.

Invest in Prevention

In between replacements, preventative maintenance helps keep your tech support costs under control. You’ll pay less in the long run by keeping business systems running smoothly over time. Basically, you pay a little more up front to spend less down the road.

Regular system checkups result in better productivity and cost savings. Finding minor issues and resolving them before they snowball into something more serious helps minimize costly emergency repairs.

Take viruses and malware, for example. The average virus costs an employee four to eight hours’ worth of work. IT support labor can run hundreds of dollars to clean the system. That is the best-case scenario. When a computer virus cannot be fixed, it can take one to three days and twice as much in labor costs. It is imperative to keep security software up to date.

Even with maintenance and upgrades, stay realistic. There will be tough (i.e., more expensive) years than others. The occasional virus will get through, but that’s to be expected in all business environments. Respond quickly to avoid even more damage to your systems and productivity.

Look years, not months, ahead when it comes to scheduling and budgeting for your IT needs. Following a proper maintenance schedule keeps costs manageable and means your hardware is less likely to fail when you need it the most.