The current statistics shown that the sales of various tech is now down and that people aren’t eagerly awaiting to buy the latest thing.

There are various reasons for this and to put your finger in the one would be wrong.

But it begs the question about what we do with old kit? I have been recently taking 7 year old laptops that have still some very good kit on board and upgrading by adding a SSD drive to them.

What do we do with our computers?

We need to look at what we now do with computers: –

• A few years ago all programmes were on the computer and so was the data until we backed it up
• The Internet was growing fast and we are getting faster access.
• So cloud storage became a thing and has grown over the last few years to an amazing level.
  • “According to recent research by Nasuni, there is over 1 Exabyte of data stored in the cloud, or: 1024 Petabytes of data. 1,073,741,824 Gigabytes of data. Quintillion bytes of data” This data was 2013. 6 years ago.
• These figures don’t even make sense to us. To try and comprehend this amount of data and storage becomes something we can’t relate to.
• Applications are also becoming more cloud driven and this will only increase over the next few years. SAAS. (Software As A Service). Office 365 is a well-known one. Google utilities, (G-suite), etc. Monthly subscriptions and the latest and greatest always at your fingertips.

So what does this mean?

Well, the strain is being taken off a lot of standalone machines as the storage needs to be less as all data goes to the cloud. (See article on using the cloud, here.)

The machines if they have a large amount of RAM and a fast SSD drive can boot up in anything from 4 seconds to 18 seconds. (The one I worked on recently booted up in 4 seconds)

So old kit can be slightly upgraded and cope very well with what you need it to do. Thus alleviating the direct need to buy the latest kit all the time.

What’s best for you?

Well, that really depends on how you operate and the things you need to achieve. But don’t immediately write off all your current kit. Maybe it is just better connections that you need or you need to think about the way you operate and see if there are ways it can be done better.

What are your thoughts on this?

Comment below.