There are so many aspects to consider in buying and maintaining laptops and PCs, the actual performance of the machine may get overlooked. Users will certainly agitate for a better, faster machine - but luckily, it's usually possible to keep them happy with upgrades, and also by making best use of the vendors' performance-boosting technology.

The first thing to say is, be proactive. Keeping staff on poorly performing machines may save in the short term, but in the long term it is a potentially disastrous strategy. It's likely to lead to data loss and even loss of business - if a creaky laptop expires in the middle of a sales presentation, for instance.

Squeezing extra years out of PCs may even contribute to loss of key staff, who can feel undervalued. It will certainly add to your IT support load - either creating resentment among and toward the IT support staff, or adding to the cost of outsourced IT help.

And consider different aspects of performance: "Keeping IT up and running is the most important thing, but look at what a user does on a daily basis," says Mike Walker, UK mobile business development manager for PC maker Lenovo, noting that different users may be more concerned with different things. They may care most about how quickly the machine boots up, how fast it can send email, or how good its wireless connectivity is.

"In the next couple of years, WiMax, and 802.11n will break all the boundaries of wireless speed we've had before, and enable people to do more things, more productively," says Walker. "We could see more productivity improvement from this than from just speeding up the machines."

But how do you keep a bunch of laptops and PCs performing well? There are different schools of thought. Some believe it's best to buy top-end machines to start with, while others prefer to step well back from the leading edge, perhaps using upgrades to eke out the life of a machine. Some like to keep equipment running till it breaks.

"We rarely purchase any upgrades," says David Fraser, chief executive of mobile web access company Devicescape. "We replace our laptops every 18 months to two years." Devicescape is a small company that has moved all its 43 staff onto laptops - including development staff, who run compute-intensive applications on server farms.

By contrast, public relations consultant Charlotte Sandy of Cohesive Communications, has been using her Dell laptop for three years. She had the memory expanded to the maximum, when she noticed that Skype internet telephony caused it to run slowly. It's only had one other hardware repair - a new keyboard to replace a coffee-damaged one, and is nearing the end of its useful life now, she says.

Cohesive is less laptop-centric. Ten of the 16 staff are office-based and use desktop systems, while laptops go to those who have to commute between the London and Chepstow offices, and work at home. Laptop purchases and upgrades are handled, along with other IT tasks, by the company's part-time IT worker.

Upgrading laptops

To all intents and purposes, the only upgrade worth doing to a laptop is to expand the memory. Most laptops have two easily accessible memory slots. Memory prices will have fallen since buying the machine, so it's generally cost-effective to upgrade the memory a year after you buy the machine.

Memory vendors such as Crucial.com have sites that describe the memory type of a machine, and the maximum it can support.

Repairs will certainly be possible - and probably necessary, particularly for staff on the road. Keyboards will fall victim to coffee spillage and screens will get damaged. Hard drives may fail - possibly more often than on stationary machines - but still very rarely, as laptops and their drives are increasingly designed to protect data in the event of a sudden drop: "It's not the end of the world if the laptop is in little pieces, as long as the data can be got off the drive," says Walker.

Replacing drives, screens and keyboards is usually possible and cost-effective, at least when the machine is not too old. However, the laptop BIOS will only support certain specific models of drive, and you may be limited to what is available on the manufacturer's website.

Alongside this, when upgrading any machine, it's worth spring-cleaning it. Copying off all the data (which should be backed up of course, anyway), wiping the disk and re-installing the operating system can make it work faster. The battery can be replaced with a higher capacity one, or a new unit that hasn't suffered capacity degradation due to too many charging cycles.

It's also worth continually keeping the system software up-to-date on a laptop - the vendor should provide an online service to keep software up-to-date, and help keep the software clean and efficient. "The ThinkVantage tools on every single unit we ship out of the door assist in constantly cleaning the laptop," says Lenovo's Walker. "This 'rejuvenation' makes software upgrades easier, and keeps the systems running longer."

Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT), part of Centrino Pro, is becoming more widely used, to allow central IT support to monitor and improve battery life and performance. It also allows IT staff to log in remotely, reboot systems and fix problems as if the machine were in the office. The system BIOS can be upgraded this way to keep the laptop running smoothly.

Dell supports the Intel AMT tools, and also the AMD-backed DASH (Desktop and mobile Architecture for System Hardware) standards. DASH was developed by the Distributed Management Task Force - a group headed by Dell's systems management director Winston Bumpus, and is intended to replace the older ASF (Alert Standard Format), using web services to provide a web-based services management tool for desktops and laptops. It is teamed with a server-side function called SMASH.

There are also plenty of other management options from Microsoft, management specialists, and open-source projects.

Tools like these, however, are more likely to get used at large enterprises, and may be too much trouble to set up for all but technology-based small companies. Cohesive's Charlotte Sandy is unaware of any central management on her laptop, but Devicescape's Fraser is positively enthusiastic: "We use AdventNet's Desktop Central," he says. "That's the kind of thing we look for. We're not scared of technology."

See also:

Competitive edge computing for SMBs part 1: Mobility

Competitive edge computing for SMBs part 2: Security