Debate: Is it worth fixing old customer PCs anymore or just tell them to buy new?

Talking to my buddy Mike at the shop in Cleveland last Tuesday got me thinking. He said he's stopped taking any desktop older than 8 years because by the time you swap a power supply or a motherboard on those old HP office boxes, the customer's in for $150 minimum and they still have a dinosaur. But I've had a few people where a used SSD for $25 plus a clean install made their 2014 laptop feel brand new again for daily web stuff. Which side you guys lean when a regular comes in with a dusty tower from 2012 or older?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_sam1mo ago

Hear me out, but I think Mike is jumping the gun a little. A 2014 laptop with a fresh SSD and maybe a RAM bump is still plenty fast for email and YouTube, and that's way cheaper than a new $400 machine that's built worse. Old HP office boxes from 2012 are a different story, I'll give him that, but a lot of those are still rocking decent i5s that just need a clean OS. I've had customers who would rather pay $100 to keep their old machine running than deal with the headache of transferring everything to a new one. If the motherboard or power supply is dead and the rest of the system is a Celeron from 2010, then yeah, tell them to shop. But a simple SSD swap on a decent older machine? That's still a no-brainer in my book.

martin.angela1mo ago

@the_sam nailed it. That SSD swap on a decent i5 from 2012 is still solid for grandma's Facebook and email, way better than pushing a cheap new plastic box.