The cost of a slow pc

This is intended for business owners, but if you’re suffering from slowpcititus feel free to quote any part of this to your boss to show how much a slow pc is costing the company. Over the past 5 years we’ve seen a lot of improvements in computer hardware and software that is making the pc experience a “breeze”.  The first thing we do as Elad with new clients is install tools on clients pc’s that will enhance the performance to take advantage of existing hardware and monitor errors so they can be taken care of before there are major disastors.  A personal friend of mine works for a .com in Los Angeles California.  He was so impressed by his boss when he walked in the door and told him, “you must use a Dell Precision desktop, besides that you decide what goes in it.”  This boss knew the importance of productivity vs. cost of downtime.  So, to help out those that don’t believe in upgrading or updating pcs, I decided I would sit down and actually calculate what a slow computer costs a company.

If we take an average of $12/hour for a full time employee.  Let’s assume this upper level employee gets two weeks vacation so they actually use their computer 50 weeks a year.  Let’s also assume they take all the national holidays off, because most upper level employees do.  So, now let’s assume they have at least decent hardware in their computer so it runs 60-80% optimal of what modern hardware would run.  Now, let’s reboot that pc one time a day for lock-ups or slowness/maintenance.  A normal reboot of a pc takes 5-10 minutes.  You know as well as I do that idle minds lead to idle hands so we’d better add another 10 minutes in for distractions of talking to neighbors, taking a trip to the snack machine (after all their pc is rebooting), or going to bathroom while their pc frustrates them.

According to Answers.com there are 250 working days in 2011.  Take away 10 days for vacation and we’ll use the working number of 240 productivity days in 2011.  Out of those 240 productivity days let’s assume an upper level employee works 8 hours.  That leads us to believe there are 1,920 productivity hours available to an employee.  Being paid $12/hour that would put this employee paid $23,040 for their productivity.

Now, let me make my point.  If that employee loses 20 minutes a day in productivity to a slow computer they would be losing 4,800 minutes (20 minutes * 240 days) over the course of a year.  This calculates to 80 hours (4,800/60 minutes) over the course of a year.  Now for the final tally, if a company lost 2 weeks of productivity to pc related problems that is going to cost the company …  $960 per year.  The “recommended” lifetime of a computer is 3-5 years, therefor $2880 – $4800.

For the .com company in California, they understood the other side of this.  If computers could stay at 100% effeciency this would not only save them a ton in lost productivity each year but increase the productivity of their employees, therefor being more profitable.

When does a pc start costing you too much?  We offer a Dell PC’s loaded with Windows7 and Microsoft Office 2010 starter with a one year warranty for $699, it looks like replacing the pc every year would still save a company almost $300/year.

Email sales@elad.cc to get your on order today.

In case your wondering about that friend in California.  He bought a $4300 quad monitor, 32gb RAM, and dual quad core 2.6 ghz Precision desktop.  Too much you think?  Not when you calculate he makes $55/hour, so his lost productivity costs would be $4400/year.