Buy a new bloody printer
That eight year old printer that puts black streaks down every page is making you look like amateurs to your clients. You won't replace it though, will you. Oh no. You spent £200 last month on a full service for it - (it's not covered under warranty or support contract, is it, cos that's expensive at £10 a month) and you want to get your moneys worth don't you?
Your staff can only print 10 pages before it jams but you have to expect that really, don't you. It's a perfectly good, reliable printer, huh?
And you've got a big stack of toner carts, you got em off ebay five years ago and it'd be a waste to throw them all away, right?
No. Buy a new bloody printer. Get warranty cover for it. Buy genuine toner for it. It's £400 for a new printer vs. £1,000 repair and maintainance per year bill. No rocket science required.
Buy your staff new PCs
But they're used to XP you say. Really? You'd have to train them all over again.
Bollocks. Show them the searchable start menu or Metro and blow their little minds.
But it'd cost £5k to get 10 new PCs.
Really? Let's do the maths.
Five minutes per day waiting for PCs to boot: 50mins lost per day for 10 employees. Let's call it an hour - 10x £10ph staff = £100.
One hour per week on support: £100/w.
£600 per week, plus all those minutes trying to open that huge spreadsheet or the Friday afternoons where no one can work because of the weekly AV scan. Then there's the disks that fail, the motherboard caps that blow, the software that won't run, the updates eating all the disk space...
Those 10 old PCs are costing you probably £1,000 a week in lost productivity. Hell, buy nine new ones and sack someone.
Do. The Maths.
The ADSL Home broadband line is not "fine for our needs"
Fine. Really? When you're trying to send those AutoCAD files over for the £200k contract and the FTP keeps falling over? That's ok?
When BT dig a hole in the road and you have no link to the outside world, that's fine is it?
When Simon in accounts is streaming porn you don't mind that he's eating all the bandwidth and that your BT Home Hub can't filter and monitor web usage? Those new Trojans on his PC aren't that much of a problem, right?
You won't have heard terms like failover, redundancy, DR, acceptable use. Well let's talk through the options and then I'll sit patiently as you explain how it's too expensive and you can happily cope with having to yell at BT once a month while your staff sit around playing Solitaire. Maybe last month's downtime will be the last, you say, crossing your fingers.
angry much?
unfortunately i agree. working for a muppet who protects his budget like its his own money right now. thinks nothing of forcing the staff to work on 4 year old laptops, then blows 100k on a switch upgrade project that isn't needed at the end of the financial year.
There are two types of company in the world: sh*tkickers who will pinch every penny and those that will throw insane amounts of money at anything perceived to be a problem. I think you've been spending too much time working with the former.