Is there ever a good time to spend money on computers? Maybe not, but there are certainly “better” times.
December is the traditional time when many businesses look for ways to spend some of the extra cash they made during the previous 11 months to minimize upcoming tax bills. If your fiscal calendar ends on 12/31, consider improving your team’s efficiency with new equipment by refreshing some of your business’s laptops, workstations, or servers.
January is actually the best time of the entire year to buy Dell equipment. Dell operates on a traditional retail fiscal year. That means their business calendar runs from Feb 1 to Jan 31 to capture all of the additional holiday spending in December. Dell devotes most of January to booking as many sales as possible to end their year strong. This means better deals for their customers. (This is based on my past 13 years of purchasing experience so I don’t think it’s just an anomaly!) If you have equipment over 4 years old, you should strongly consider some new equipment sooner rather than later and January promises the best deals. (Dell also has better pricing at the end of their quarters which are April, July, and October.)
Some of our other customers are buying 27″ displays for their team, which according to a recent study, increases efficiency of Excel users by 80%. Others are upgrading server hardware so they can get to their files faster, and still others have purchased switches and new routers to speed up their network performance.
Interested in getting a quote for some new computer equipment? Feel free to reach out to your Client Liaison, drop me an email (neiman@dynedge.com), or call the office.
Windows 8 Warning
It takes a while for new operating systems to work the bugs out, so while we aren’t branding Windows 8 a total bust yet (a la Windows Vista), it will need more time out in the wild before we pass judgment.
So far, we have not seen good things from Windows 8 and we do not recommend upgrading to it yet. We advise you to purchase any new business equipment with Windows 7.
One issue we are seeing (which is a common problem with new operating systems) is that older software isn’t playing nice with Windows 8. This means you could have to upgrade other software in addition to the cost of new machines. Even worse, for business specific programs that were created by smaller developing companies, upgrades may not even exist.
Once Windows 8 becomes the mainstay, developers will craft their software to work with it, but for now, stick with what works to save your company some major headaches
~Tim
