Takeaway: When equipment reaches the end of its useful life, IT must either dispose of it or find it a new home. Here are several good ways to handle the situation.

Few companies amortize their computing equipment for more than three years of useful life. So once computing assets reach the end of the line, what do you do with them? In 2013, some best practice answers remain the same, but others are new. Here’s a checklist for dealing with old IT equipment.

1: Meet Your Green Requirements

In some industries and geographical areas, companies are now required to demonstrate adherence to green standards and environmental sustainability. One way to show compliance is by having environmentally effective policies for disposing of old computing equipment. In doing so, you also contribute to corporate sustainability compliance. There is value in that.

2: Work with Local Schools

Corporate IT can partner with local schools by donating good but used equipment that they can use for technology projects. Some companies take this goodwill effort even further by partnering with schools in tech development programs that include student internships with the company. “Proven” interns from these programs can make excellent IT hires. The company also develops a great reputation in the community.

3: Use Older Equipment for Training and Testing

Especially in thin client application environments that don’t depend on compute-in-the-box (think cloud), older equipment is ideal for training, which historically operates on thin budgets and is always looking for a resource infusion.

You can also use older equipment for testing purposes, as long as your test results will accurately emulate the production environment they are targeted for.

4: Cannibalize

Some older equipment can be used as spare part sources if there is enough version compatibility between the old and the new equipment. Replacement disk drives are a great example.

5: Work your Trade-ins (lease/buy)

Never underestimate your ability to trade up to new equipment by turning in your old equipment. You can secure a discount that may be as much as one-third of your new equipment retail price. If you lease equipment instead of buying it, a mechanism in the lease contract allows you to get credit for older equipment on the lease that you are exchanging for new.

6: Sell to the Third-party Market

Especially for power servers, mainframes, and disk drives, you can usually find a third-party reseller of older equipment that will buy it from you (only to resell it to another company). However, to qualify your equipment for this market, you must first recertify it with its original vendor. In the equipment re-certification process, the vendor examines and (if necessary) repairs the equipment to make sure it is production-ready.

7: Cycle Down Older Equipment to Low Power Users

In most companies, the high power users are in areas like finance and engineering. Users requiring desktop or laptop computers with fewer bells and whistles might be in the warehouse, the factory, or in work locations where there is a lot of environmental interference (dust, etc.), which you don’t want to subject your newest equipment to. Many companies have a downward rotation cycle they apply to desktop and laptop computers that cycles these assets into lower-power user groups after a certain time frame. By using this strategy, companies can often extend the life cycles of these assets for two or more years.

8: Sell or Auction Older Equipment to Employee

Many employees look for inexpensive laptops that they and their children can use at home or at school. If they can purchase a nice computer that might not be the latest and greatest but that still works and fits their budgets, they are happy to take an older piece of equipment off your hands.

9: Donate to Charities

Charities are always looking for free computing equipment that can run their operations. However, never approach them with an eye toward dumping off equipment that is so antiquated it won’t support Internet or run a current word processor or spreadsheet program. In fact, many charities have wised up to the old “dump it” approach and now set minimum standards for accepting older equipment (e.g., “must at least run a Windows 7 operating system”).

10: Sell for Scrap

Companies used to give away old equipment to recycling.  But in today’s lucrative scrap metal market, the goal instead should be to sell this equipment to scrappers.

If you are looking to purchase new equipment please contact us at (856) 745-9990. 

Takeaway: From diagnostic tools to antivirus to backup utilities, this list of freebies will help you do more with less.

If you’re trying to stretch a thin IT budget, you probably can’t afford a lot of pricey tools. Luckily, a number of highly useful tools are available for free. Some of them even work better and are more efficient than their costlier alternatives.

1: ComboFix

When the standard antivirus/malware software can’t seem to find the problem, ComboFix almost always does. It also looks for and removes most rootkits and Trojans. To use this tool, you must completely disable all antivirus solutions (and you should completely remove AVG). Caution: If ComboFix is not used properly, it can wreak havoc on the machine you’re trying to fix.

2: ProduKey

ProduKey will help you get product keys from installed applications so that when you need to migrate to a new machine, you can continue using those costly licenses. ProduKey will recover keys from more than 1,000 software titles, including Microsoft Office, Adobe, and Symantec. When you use this tool, you will have both the product ID and the product key; the ID is important because it will tell you which version of the software is installed.

3: Hiren’s BootCD

Hiren’s BootCD is a one-stop-shop Linux boot disk that can help you pull off a number of small miracles. Its tools include Antivir, ClamWin, ComboFix, Clonedisk, Image for Windows, BIOS Cracker, 7-Zip, Bulk Rename, Mini Windows XP, CCleaner, and Notepad++, among others. This single bootable disk could easily be the only tool you need.

4: Microsoft Security Essentials

Microsoft Security Essentials is one of the better free antivirus tools available. Its tagline, “The anti-annoying, anti-expensive, anti-virus program,” is true. When the firm I work with was looking for a new free solution, we tested Microsoft Security Essentials against AVG Free and Avast Free and found Microsoft Security Essentials to be superior, less intrusive, and less resource intensive.

Note: Microsoft Security Essentials can be used for free for up to 10 PCs. Beyond that, you can purchase the business version, System Center Endpoint Protection.

5: WinDirStat

WinDirStat is the program you need when you must know what is taking up the space on a hard drive. When C drives begin to fill up, performance degrades rapidly. It’s essential to have a tool to help you discern what is gobbling up the precious space on a machine, and WinDirStat is the foremost app for getting this information quickly.

6: CCleaner

CCleaner gets rid of temporary files and Windows Registry problems faster than any other tool. When a machine is having problems, this is almost always the tool I use first. CCleaner also helps ensure privacy by getting rid of traces left behind (such as cookies) by Web browsers.

Note: It is legal to use CCleaner Free for business use. However, CCleaner Business Editioncomes with a few more features (including one-click cleaning) than the free version.

7: Defraggler

Defraggler blows away the defragmenting application in all Windows operating systems. It’s faster, more reliable, and more flexible than the built-in tools. With Defraggler, you can defrag a single file or an entire drive. Defraggler supports NTFS and FAT32 systems.

8: 7-Zip

7-Zip is the best file archiver/compression tool (outside of Linux command-line tools). It’s open source and works on multiple platforms. Once you install it, you will find 7-Zip has Explorer support and a simple GUI tool that any level of user can manage.

9: SyncBack

SyncBack is a reliable, easy-to-use backup utility. No, you won’t be recovering from bare metal, but you can save your precious data. SyncBack can synchronize data to the same drive, a different drive or medium (CDRW, CompactFlash, etc.), an FTP server, a network, or a zip archive.

10: FileZilla

FileZilla reminds you that the cloud has not made FTP useless. There are plenty of reasons you might need FTP, so why not use one of the best and most cost effective FTP clients? And if you need an easy-to-use FTP server to slap up on your Windows machines, FileZilla has one.

Takeaway: Find out why Microsoft may still win the tablet war, even if its early efforts are unsuccessful.

After spending time with Microsoft’s Surface RT tablet, we were left with more questions than answers. The further we considered Microsoft’s tablet strategy, the more we wondered if it were genius or madness driving its recent moves. Depending on what we see in the next few months, it just might be the former.

Leaving the Home Court

Surface was most perplexing in that Microsoft aced the hardware of the device — an area most pundits, expected it to miss completely. The device was sleek and well-assembled, and it brought unique and noteworthy features to the table rather than simply trying to copy market leaders. If only the software were on par with the hardware.

The OS was particularly troubling, considering Microsoft essentially invented the tablet category a decade ago, only to let it languish until Apple ate its lunch and dominated the market in a matter of months. While all this is old news, and Windows RT remains what seems to be a compromised OS, there are some interesting things happening on the software front.

An Office for Everyone

Microsoft began its life as an applications software company, achieving dominance in the desktop space through luck and tenacity. People often forget that Microsoft set out to build applications for a variety of platforms rather than create the one that would dominate desktop computing for a generation. While Microsoft has released its Office suite for some competing platforms, the most interesting missing links in the Office world are mobile versions of the software for iOS and Android. There have been enough rumors and rumblings about an iOS version of Office that the rumor has a measure of credibility.

Microsoft also seems a bit more pragmatic and less dogmatic than Apple, and it has released several applications for the iOS platform, from relatively innocuous photography applications to versions of its SkyDrive cloud-based file storage platform. SkyDrive is available for all major OSs, and Microsoft’s cloud strategy points toward open platforms rather than a walled garden like Apple’s iCloud. With a Microsoft-based cloud storage service already gaining traction on a variety of platforms, mobile versions of Office don’t seem as much of a stretch as they might have been a few months ago.

Returning to its roots around application software might not be a bad strategy for Microsoft. Clearly, Surface has not lit the world afire in its first incarnation, so launching popular applications on a variety of platforms would keeps Microsoft relevant in the enterprise and personal space, no matter which tablet device an enterprise ends up selecting.

There’s also the possibility of a halo effect should Microsoft deliver a quality mobile Office experience on a variety of platforms. The iPod music player and iPhone arguably sold more Mac computers than any ad campaign, and a suite of compelling software and services might make a case for a deeper Microsoft experience, especially in the enterprise.

The End of the Platform

While the proclamations that the “desktop is dead” have not been as dire as predicted, many applications are shifting to the cloud- and browser-based interfaces. In mobile, especially, core application logic and data are cloud-based for most popular applications. Tablets and smartphones generally don’t have the “baggage” of legacy applications that have saddled our desktop computing experience, so in many ways, mobile operating systems are more likely to fade toward irrelevancy beyond running cloud-based applications. If Microsoft can rekindle its multi-platform application heritage and combine it with a strong hardware competency, it might successfully win the longer tablet war, even if its early efforts sputter.