Laptop Refresh Math: 3, 4, or 5 Years?

Most West Texas offices run laptops until they die. It feels thrifty. The machine still boots, and nobody wants to spend $1,400 on a computer that mostly opens a browser and a practice-management app.

Then the fleet ages together, machines start failing the same quarter, and the replacement order lands as an emergency nobody budgeted for. Here is the math we walk owners through on how long a business laptop should stay in service.

The cost that never shows up on the invoice

The purchase price is the easy number, and the smallest. The costs that decide the answer hide in payroll:

• Support hours. Old machines generate tickets. Slow boots, failing batteries, docking-station weirdness, drivers that no longer get updates.
• Lost user time. A staffer waiting four minutes for a machine to wake up, several times a day, gives back real hours over a year.
• Unplanned downtime. A dead drive on the wrong Tuesday costs a rebuild, a restore, and a day of that person’s work.
• Warranty gap. After the warranty ends, every repair is parts plus labor plus shipping, if the part is still made.

None of that lands in the books as “laptop.” It lands as IT spend and overtime.

Run the number per year, not per purchase

Take a $1,400 business laptop, spread it across the years in service, then add what it costs to keep alive:

Service life	Hardware per year	Support and downtime per year	Total per year
3 years	~$467	Low	Lowest total, highest cash out
4 years	~$350	Moderate	Usually the best number
5 years	~$280	High and unpredictable	Cheapest on paper, worst in practice

Plug in your own support figures. The pattern holds. Hardware cost per year keeps falling as you stretch the service life, but support cost per year climbs faster than the hardware line drops, and it climbs hardest once the warranty ends.

Why year five bites

Warranty coverage on most business laptops runs one to three years, extendable to four or five if you buy it up front. Batteries lose real capacity by year four, so the portable computer becomes a desktop with a bad screen. Parts thin out, and a keyboard or hinge for a five-year-old model turns into a two-week wait.

Correlation is the other problem. Buy twelve laptops in one order and they age as a group. Failures cluster, and the budget hit clusters with them.

Cadence by role, not by fleet

A 25-person office needs three or four answers, not one.

• Heavy users (design, imaging, two big applications at once) go on a 3-year cycle. Their time is the expensive part.
• Standard office seats (front desk, billing, admin) go 4 years. Most seats land here.
• Light or shared seats (break room, check-in kiosk) can run 5 years or longer, because a failure there is an inconvenience, not a stoppage.
• Anything touching regulated data takes the shortest cycle it can support. An unpatched machine is a compliance problem before it is a performance problem.

Then stagger the buying. Replacing a quarter of the fleet every year turns a lumpy capital expense into a predictable one and breaks up the failure cluster.

The Windows 11 wrinkle

Microsoft ended support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025. Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0 and a supported processor, which a lot of pre-2018 hardware does not have. So “run it till it dies” has a hard floor now. If a machine cannot take Windows 11, its service life ended regardless of how well it boots.

What to do with the ones you retire

Keep two retired machines as imaged spares on a shelf for a new hire whose order has not landed or a loaner during a repair. The rest get wiped to a documented standard and recycled. A drive with client data on it does not go to an auction or an employee’s kid.

How we handle it

Every machine we manage is tracked with its purchase date, warranty end, and expected replacement year. That list goes to the owner once a year, so hardware shows up in the budget before it shows up as an outage.

If you want a quick read before you commit to a walkthrough, the free Cyber Score takes about two minutes and emails you a written grade on what an attacker can see about your domain from outside. If nobody has the hardware list for your office, we will build it. The free IT Blueprint Assessment inventories every machine, flags the ones that cannot take Windows 11, and leaves you a replacement schedule. Free walkthrough, written punch list. Public number: (806) 370-4700.

Common questions

How long should a business laptop last?

Four years is the practical answer for a standard office seat. Heavy users are better off on three. Five works only for light or shared machines where a failure is an inconvenience, not a work stoppage.

Is it cheaper to repair an old laptop or replace it?

Once the warranty ends, a repair past roughly a third of the replacement cost is rarely worth it on a machine over four years old. You are paying real money to extend a device that is already generating support hours.

Should a small business replace all its computers at once?

No. A fleet bought in one order ages and fails as one group. Replacing a quarter of the machines each year keeps the spend predictable.