Upgrade, repair, replace, or limp along?

When money's tight, how do you keep things going and save money at the same time? I think you need a process to decide what to do with equipment that dies. When are you better off repairing/replacing, when to upgrade, and when to just let it die and do without?

My first rule is to upgrade whenever security is an issue. Many small businesses, especially those with 20 or fewer employees, still connect to the Internet through a consumer router they bought at Best Buy for $50 five years ago. When that finally dies, do not replace it with the same model, because your security needs have grown, whether you admit it or not.

Modern routers include much more robust firewalls and virus and spyware filtering tools. As your company grows, new employees won't have the same work ethic and dedication to the company as the old hands. You may not need to track if Employee #2 in seniority is wasting time on a Fantasy Football league Web site, but it is nice to know if Employee #27 has a Facebook addiction.

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When money's tight, how do you keep things going and save money at the same time? I think you need a process to decide what to do with equipment that dies. When are you better off repairing/replacing, when to upgrade, and when to just let it die and do without?

My first rule is to upgrade whenever security is an issue. Many small businesses, especially those with 20 or fewer employees, still connect to the Internet through a consumer router they bought at Best Buy for $50 five years ago. When that finally dies, do not replace it with the same model, because your security needs have grown, whether you admit it or not.

Modern routers include much more robust firewalls and virus and spyware filtering tools. As your company grows, new employees won't have the same work ethic and dedication to the company as the old hands. You may not need to track if Employee #2 in seniority is wasting time on a Fantasy Football league Web site, but it is nice to know if Employee #27 has a Facebook addiction.

It will cost a few hundred dollars to get a business class router, but it's worth it. Just the ability to see who's going to which Web sites provides endless hours of fascination, unless you're happy paying people to stalk stuffed penguins and the like on eBay. This upgrade is particularly needed if your single company router provides wireless access. The older routers have wireless security, kind of, but new wireless security router modules actually stop hackers, not just annoy them.

Mobile workers really need security upgrades on their equipment. Never buy another laptop for field use that doesn't support full disk encryption. Buying a model with a biometric fingerprint reader is OK, but a single good password to bypass the full disk encryption security will really protect your data. Just don't let your employees choose a braindead password from this list of Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time.

Should you run out and upgrade your security equipment right away? If you have the money, then yes. If not, just make sure you upgrade anything to do with security, including backup for your files, whenever your existing system breaks.

Speaking of laptops, I now recommend that most companies forget desktops and buy laptops or workstations. With the lower price of laptops, and their increasing power and screen size, buy those in place of off the shelf desktops. Plus, since laptops use only about a third of the juice, you can call yourself green with a semi-straight face.

Another technology area that has really improved in services and features while dropping in price is hosted e-mail services. If you have your own e-mail server today, especially if it's Microsoft Exchange, you know the time and trouble required to keep it up and running. I've talked to several companies this past year that have around 50 employees and run their own Exchange server. Each one of them has one tech that spends more than half the workday keeping that system running correctly, dealing with spam, viruses, and traffic load problems constantly.