hardware-buying-guide

buy few models, not the cheapest one

• Pick two or three standard machines and buy only those for two years. One image, one dock, one charger, one spare-parts drawer.
• Buy the business line of a vendor, not the consumer line at the same price. You get a service manual, replaceable parts, a vendor update tool, three years of driver updates, and a warranty that sends a technician.
• The cheapest machine costs the most: an hour of a user waiting, or of you repairing, is worth more than the price difference.
• Buy a spare of each standard machine. A user with a broken notebook then loses an hour, not a week.

notebooks and desktops by role

• Screen: 14 inches for travellers, 15 or 16 for people who mostly sit at one desk. At least Full HD, matt, 300 nits or more.
• Always a TPM, a camera with a cover, and a keyboard in the right layout. Check the layout on the order confirmation.
• For people on the road: mobile data built in costs little and ends the hotel Wi-Fi tickets.

the desk: monitors, docks, the rest

• Two 24-inch monitors or one 27-inch at 1440p for office work. One 34-inch ultrawide instead of two screens suits people who work in long tables or timelines.
• A monitor with USB-C that charges the notebook and has a built-in hub replaces the dock for many desks: one cable, fewer parts to fail.
• One dock model for the whole company, from the notebook vendor, and one notebook charger wattage that covers the largest machine.
• Height-adjustable stands or arms, a wired headset per person who phones, a real keyboard and mouse for anyone docked most of the day. These are the cheapest productivity purchases there are.

servers and storage

• Ask first whether it needs to be a server in the building at all. Mail, files and many applications are cheaper and safer as a service for a small company. What stays is usually a file share for large data, a line-of-business application, and backups.
• One solid server with redundant power supplies, a proper RAID controller or ZFS, and a support contract with a four-hour or next-day response beats two cheap ones.
• Size by the application vendor's figures plus half again, and leave memory slots and drive bays free.
• A UPS and a tested shutdown belong to the purchase, and so does the backup target, in another room at least.
• A NAS is fine for backups and file shares. It is not a place for the only copy of anything.

Size the storage with the RAID calculator, the power with the UPS runtime calculator, and the cabinet with the rack planner.

warranty and support

• Three years on-site, next business day, for notebooks and desktops. It costs little when bought with the machine and a lot afterwards.
• Accidental damage cover for notebooks that travel. Screens and spilled coffee are the usual claims.
• "Keep your hard drive" where the data is sensitive: a failed disk stays with you instead of going back to the vendor.
• Servers and core switches: support for as long as you plan to run them, usually five years, with a response time that matches what an outage costs.
• Register the serial numbers and note the end dates on the day of delivery.

how long to keep things

• Replace a fifth of the fleet every year instead of everything every five. The budget is flat, and there is never a year in which all machines are old at once.
• The end of security updates is the hard limit for anything connected to the network, whatever its condition.

at the end

• Wipe before anything leaves the building. For an SSD, the secure erase of the vendor's tool or the firmware. With full-disk encryption from day one, deleting the key is enough.
• Disks that held sensitive data and cannot be wiped, because they failed, are destroyed, with a record.
• Remove the device from device management, from the directory, from the inventory and from the vendor's registration, or it turns up in reports for years.
• Sell or donate what still gets updates, recycle the rest through a certified channel, and keep the receipt.

Phones have their own trap: mobile device checklist. Preparing a new machine: new PC setup checklist.