Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Crappy Hardware Not Worth It

OK, so for work I have the latest and greatest laptop...

Well, it was 5 years ago.

My work insist on buying "corporate" grade laptops that cost thousands of dollars.  The CIO gets the newest once a year or two, and then those of use who are remote get the hand-me-downs.  I'm about on the third wrung down.

I noticed something.  My home laptop, which is the latest and greatest ASUS light weight gaming laptop of course :)  boots up including entering my login in under 10 seconds.  From there I'm ready to go.

On my current hand-me-down work computer it is taking me from initial startup to actually having Visual Studio and a few other things up about 5 minutes.

So, for an argument for me at least a "consumer" grade gaming computer that rocks for about 1000 bucks-

Say I lose 2.5 minutes of productivity a day with booting my work laptop up and opening up software which is being generous (Visual Studio 2015 sometimes takes 2 or 3 minutes to boot).  So I'm not going to tell you how much I make but let's use a 50 dollar an hour figure.   Let's also take a 48 week work year.

48 Weeks x 5 Days a Week x 2.5 minutes = 10 hours a year of wasted productivity time x $50 and hour = $500 bucks.

Now considering corporations can right off hardware purchases as a business expense that is the equivalent of about $600 of buying power.  So that gives my company about $1200 worth of purchasing power for getting me a new laptop every two years.  And I would be totally happy with a "consumer" gaming machine (which has plenty of power and reliability) over a "corporate grade" block that cost 2x more.

My last "consumer" grade machine which at the time I also used for work because I didn't want the hand-me-downs ran flawlessly for about 14 hours a day 6 days a week for over 3 years while my co-workers "corporate" laptops tended to have issues.

Note, I haven't brought this up at work yet or cried about it there, but I might.  

So there is some ammo you can use for someone to justify getting a new machine.

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