Higher costs for small businesses that use aged PCs: Techaisle study

According to a new study, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that hang on to their PCs for more than three years in hopes of saving money during the downturn are actually setting themselves up for significant increases in maintenance and repair costs, as well as security and system failures, says a new study.

The study, conducted by research firm Techaisle, revealed:

Older PCs cause up to a 58 per cent increase in security breaches: the study demonstrates up to a 58 per cent increase in virus incidents with PCs over three years old.

Once infected, the data shows that there is a 23 per cent increase in related downtime to fix desktop systems and 22 per cent increase for notebooks.

Up to 52 per cent more small and medium businesses (SMBs) experience serious failures on older systems: the number of SMBs suffering from crashes with PCs less than three years old is small in comparison to those with older systems. Thirty-three per cent of SMBs faced hard-drive failures in their older systems against eight per cent with newer systems.

Motherboard failures affected 14 per cent of older PCs compared to 4 per cent of newer PCs.