Reduce IT related costs in your business
How to reduce the costs associated with the purchase, maintenance or operation of the hardware in the company? Here are some tips and best practices to consider for an effective cost efficient approarch.
Increase the lifetime of a PC
- Clean the PC and peripherals (tower, fan and processor, cards, keyboard, monitor) each year. Dust buildup may cause the overheating of computer components and can cause failures, knowing that certain components are particularly sensitive, such as RAMs units.
The cleaning operation is carried out once the equipment is turned off. The equipment required is as follows: air sprays, several screwdrivers and soft bristle brushes of different sizes, swabs and wipes.
- Regular software maintenance (cleaning the hard disk, defrag, uninstallation of unused programs, anti-spyware scan, update firmware)
- Add memory (RAM) to allow intensive programs to run more smoothly.
- Secure your PC: keep your program and OS up-to-date (Windows update and other programs: Java), install a professionalantivirus , delete unnecessary files using software like CCleaner.
- Setting energy saving options via Windows Control Panel: To define a timeout from which some components of the computer are automatically set in standby mode.
- Transform an old PC into a "small Linux Client": it allows to significantly extend the lifetime of a computer. Linux distributions (such as Ubuntu) have many advantages: low memory consumption, low disk space consumption, high stability and security and hardware compatibility is optimal. Many open source software are available for Linux distributions and they can replace proprietary software.
- Virtualization of desktops: Virtualization allows you to run one or more operating systems or applications on a group of computers (via Cloud Computing), instead of installing the software on each machine individually.
Turn off workstations at night
Some software allows the centralized "Power Management" and can perform this task automatically, as is the case of the solution developed by
Avob.
Buy refurbished computer equipment
Some sites offer e-commerce sales of refurbished computer equipment: these come from from acquisition of computer equipment from large companies, unsold or returned to the manufacturer.
The equipment is tested before being sold at a good prices.
Use OpenSource or Free software for business
Some free and multiplatform software advantageously replace proprietary software (licensed).
It is important to make an accurate inventory of needs to determine whether certain free software may or may not replace proprietary software.
Among the possible alternatives:
View this page of correspondence between free software and proprietary software on
Wikipedia.
Using cloud services
The use of online collaborative services and solutions for backup or file storage, shall avoid the costs indirectly related due to a computer failure resulting in loss of data or files.
See also
Knowledge communities.
Original article published by
CommentCaMarche. Translated by
deri58.
