There are two ways a business computer leaves service. The planned way: it reaches the end of a known lifespan, its replacement is already budgeted and imaged, and the swap takes an hour. The usual way: it dies on the morning it was needed most, taking unsaved work with it, and its replacement is bought at panic speed, set up badly, and remembered as “that week”. The machines are identical in both stories; the difference is entirely whether anyone wrote down a date. This page supplies the dates: how long each class of kit honestly lasts, the signs one is leaving early, and how to fund the whole cycle so it stops producing events.
The lifespans, honestly
- Laptops: 4 to 5 years. Batteries fade, hinges and keyboards wear, and performance falls behind the software asked of them. Years one to four are productive; year five is a judgement call; year six is a machine costing more in waiting time than its replacement’s monthly cost. Heavy travel use trims a year; desk-bound docked laptops gain one.
- Desktops: 5 to 6 years. No battery, no travel damage, so the same internals last longer. The practical limit is usually performance against current software rather than failure.
- Servers: 5 years, with a hard edge. The lifespan is less about the hardware surviving (it often will) and more about the warranty cliff: manufacturer support and next-day-part cover typically run five years, after which a failed component in an old server means sourcing parts for discontinued kit while the business stands still. An out-of-warranty production server is an unpriced risk on the balance sheet, and the refresh decision is really a fork: replace it, or use the moment to retire the workload to cloud and exit the cycle entirely.
- Network kit (switches, firewalls, APs): 5 to 7 years, with the firewall’s security-update end-date the binding constraint rather than the hardware. A firewall no longer receiving updates is a security appliance in name only.
- The software boundary trumps all of the above. A machine that cannot run a supported operating system is done regardless of its health, which is exactly the Windows 10 situation forcing refresh decisions this year: unsupported Windows fails Cyber Essentials, troubles insurers, and accumulates unpatched vulnerabilities monthly.
The signs a machine is leaving early
Aggregate lifespans are planning numbers; individual machines announce their own departures. The signals worth acting on rather than tolerating: boot and wake times measured in minutes, fans running flat-out at idle, batteries that no longer cover a meeting, the same machine appearing in support tickets monthly, and (for servers) disk or memory warnings in monitoring, which is precisely what monitoring exists to catch before the morning it matters. One useful arithmetic habit: a member of staff losing fifteen minutes a day to a slow machine costs the business more per year than the machine’s replacement; “still works” and “still earns its desk” are different tests.
Funding the cycle: provision, not events
The refresh cycle only hurts when it is funded as surprises. The alternative is the standing provision from the IT budget guide: roughly £150 to £250 per user per year covers a £700 to £1,200 business machine on a 4-to-5-year cycle plus peripherals, converted into a boring annual line. Two structural choices sit on top:
- Buy vs lease. Outright purchase is cheapest over the term and suits stable headcounts; leasing (or Device-as-a-Service bundles) converts hardware to a flat monthly cost, keeps the fleet inside warranty by construction, and suits growing or cash-conscious businesses. Both work; the failure mode is neither, funded by panic.
- Stagger, don’t cliff. Replacing everything in one heroic year creates the next cliff five years out. A quarter of the fleet per year produces level spend, a fleet never more than a generation old, and a natural hand-me-down chain (newest machines to heaviest users).
- Retire properly. Old machines hold company data: disposal means wiped-to-standard drives (or destroyed), asset records updated, and WEEE-compliant recycling with certificates. The £40 saved selling an unwiped laptop on a marketplace is the cheapest data breach on offer.
Buying advice in one paragraph: business-grade machines (the manufacturers’ pro lines) over consumer models for the warranty, build and manageability; specifications one comfortable notch above today’s need, since the machine must be adequate in year four, not just year one; and SSDs and sufficient memory everywhere, the two components that determine whether a machine ages gracefully. The health check turns this into a model-level shortlist when the time comes.
Frequently asked questions
How often should business laptops be replaced?
Every 4 to 5 years as a planning number, adjusted per machine by condition and role. The test is economic rather than mechanical: when lost staff time and rising failure risk exceed the amortised cost of new, the machine is due, which usually happens before it actually dies.
How long do servers really last?
Hardware often runs past five years; warranty and parts support generally do not, which is the real deadline. At the five-year mark the honest question is not “which server next” but “should this workload still be on a server”, and the cloud answer wins often enough that it deserves the first look.
Is it cheaper to repair or replace an old computer?
Inside warranty: repair, obviously. Out of warranty on a 4-plus-year-old machine: replacement wins in most cases once the repair price, the machine’s remaining life and the downtime are counted together. Recurring faults on an ageing machine are the clearest replace signal there is.
Should a small business lease or buy computers?
Buying costs less over the term; leasing smooths cash flow and enforces the refresh discipline automatically. The right answer follows the balance sheet and growth rate rather than ideology, and it is a five-minute conversation inside the budget review.
What should we do with old business computers?
Certified data wiping (or drive destruction), then WEEE-compliant recycling, donation or resale, with a paper trail. The data step is the non-negotiable one: storage devices leave the building only after the data provably has.
Do refresh cycles apply if we’re fully cloud?
The server line disappears (a genuine saving of the cloud move), but laptops, networking and the software boundary remain, and the provision logic is unchanged. Cloud shrinks the cycle; it does not end it.
Get the dates written down
The free IT health check includes the fleet audit: every machine’s age, warranty state and health, the Windows-boundary exposure, and a staggered replacement plan with the annual provision priced, so hardware goes back to being boring. Get in touch and swap “that week” for a diary entry.
