Algeria AgencyIT infrastructure
Twelve machines bought together grow old together
Buying the same hardware twelve times is the right advice. Nobody says what it costs three years later, or how to stagger it.
The article accompanying this one defends a rule we still defend: for a fleet of this size, homogeneity beats specification. Twelve identical machines are repaired, replaced and documented in one go.
This page deals with its consequence, which arrives three years later and which nobody plans for. Twelve machines bought in the same week come out of warranty in the same week, fail in the same season, and are replaced in a single budget line.
This is not an argument against homogeneity. It is the argument for the one thing that makes it bearable: knowing what you own, since when, and until when — and then staggering.
The real subject of this article is therefore a six-column file, what goes in it, and the three decisions it makes possible. There is nothing technical here, and that is precisely why the task never gets done.
Homogeneity has a reverse side, and it arrives at three years
Start by acknowledging the rule’s value, because what follows does not cancel it.
A homogeneous fleet costs less to run in every respect: one model to know, interchangeable parts, a single system image, a single contact at the supplier, and repairs that often amount to swapping two machines.
The reverse side is purely temporal. What is bought together grows old together: warranties expire in the same week, disks reach their wear in roughly the same period, and the model stops being stocked on the same date for everybody.
The budgetary consequence is brutal and entirely predictable. A business that equipped twelve desks at once finds itself, thirty-six months later, facing an expense it has not provisioned because it arrived all at once instead of in thirds.
The operational consequence is worse than the budgetary one: when the cash is not there nothing gets replaced, and an entire fleet is run for eighteen months out of warranty, where every failure is now an unbudgeted expense and a lost day.
The register: six columns, and the one everybody forgets
The remedy is a file anybody can keep, and its value comes from two of its six columns.
The six: serial number, model, purchase date, warranty end, the person or desk using it, and where it is. Nothing else gets read.
The one everybody forgets is the fourth. The purchase date is on the invoice and can be found; the warranty end takes a calculation, a check with the supplier, and sometimes registering the product — so it is not recorded, so it does not exist.
It is nonetheless the only column that lets you anticipate anything. A register without warranty end dates is an inventory; with them, it is a calendar.
The medium does not matter and should stay simple. A spreadsheet of yours, not inside a provider’s tool — the same argument the change log elsewhere on this site makes: a document whose value is that it outlives you cannot live at somebody else’s.
The machine nobody claims
The first inventory of a twenty-desk fleet always finds between one and three that belong to nobody, and that finding is more useful than it looks.
The typical cases: a desk left by somebody who has gone, a test machine that became a production machine, a laptop lent to an intern two years ago, an old server still running in a cupboard with nobody sure what it serves.
Each carries two kinds of risk. It holds company data whose backup nobody owns, and it is powered on your network with nobody applying its updates.
The rule that settles it is easy to state and unpopular: every machine that is switched on has an owner’s name in the register, or it is switched off. Not "unplugged one day" — switched off on the day it is discovered to have no owner.
The most frequent discovery of that first pass is in any case not a machine but a role: the desk that carries, written down nowhere, the accounting department’s shared file or the application that produces delivery notes.
The serial number is the only identity
Everything above rests on being able to designate a machine unambiguously, and only one thing allows it.
Not the name given in the system, which changes when somebody reinstalls. Not the position in the office, which changes at the first move. Not the user’s name, which changes more often than the hardware.
The serial number is engraved, it is on the invoice, it is on the box, and the supplier recognises it. It is the register’s key and it is what the service desk will ask for before speaking to you.
Record it on receipt rather than three years later: on many laptops the label wears away at exactly the point where the hand rests, and recovering it then means dismantling the machine or digging through the system.
Two ten-minute habits that save hours: photograph the invoice and the serial number as the machine is unboxed, and keep the photographs in the same folder as the register. The day you need them, the original invoice will be with the accountant and the box at the tip.
The warranty does not start when you imagine
The warranty end date is more slippery than a stated duration suggests, and three discrepancies recur.
The first is the starting point. Depending on the manufacturer and the channel it can be the invoice date, the delivery date, or the date of first power-on. On a batch delivered in two parts, that moves the warranty end by several weeks between identical machines.
The second is hardware left in stock. A machine bought in January and unboxed in June may have consumed five months of warranty in its box, and that is the reason not to buy ahead "to take advantage of a price".
The third is the extension. It almost always exists, it is cheap at purchase and very expensive afterwards, and it requires registering within a deadline — which nobody does, because at delivery everybody is busy installing.
The companion article says the warranty that counts is the one that applies here, at a repairer you can reach. Add this one: a warranty whose end date you do not know does not apply either, because nobody thinks to claim it.
Staggering purchases: the rule of a third
The correction to the main problem fits in one sentence: never renew more than a third of the fleet in the same year.
The first pass is the hardest because the fleet is already synchronised. You stagger it deliberately: a third this year, a third next, a third the year after — starting with the most heavily used desks rather than the oldest.
That initial gap is paid once: a few machines are kept a year longer than is comfortable. It is a real cost, and it buys a regularity that then lasts indefinitely.
Once staggering is achieved it maintains itself, provided one thing is forbidden: buying the remainder of a batch to "harmonise". That is the temptation that resynchronises the fleet, and it presents itself every time a machine fails.
Homogeneity remains available in tranches rather than across a whole fleet: twelve machines from three close generations are repaired almost as easily as twelve identical ones, and the operational gap is far smaller than that of a block renewal.
What triggers a replacement at fleet level
This section is about the fleet and not about a machine: the decision to repair or replace a specific desk belongs to the article on repair, which argues it in days of downtime rather than in dinars.
Three collective signals justify scheduling a replacement, and none of them is a failure. The first is coming out of warranty: from then on every incident costs a part, a call-out and a day, and the arithmetic changes for the whole fleet at once.
The second is the model going out of supply. The day the supplier can no longer deliver the same machine, the homogeneity argument is extinguished, and keeping the fleet longer no longer preserves it.
The third is software: a business application, an operating system or a browser that stops being supported on the hardware in place. This one arrives with a date known in advance, which makes it the only one of the three that can go into a budget two years ahead.
Note that none of those three signals is "the machines are slow". Slowness is a symptom whose order of treatment the companion article gives — disk, memory, processor — and it is often corrected for a tenth of the price of a replacement.
The desk that leaves with the person
The register earns most of its usefulness on the days somebody arrives or leaves, and that is where a fleet is lost most quietly.
When an employee leaves, three objects have to come back and be ticked in the register: the machine, its charger, and anything lent around it — screen, key, phone. The missing charger is a joke until six are missing and they are worth the price of a desk.
The machine that comes back does not go to another user as it is. It is wiped and reinstalled, and the register line changes owner at that moment, not before.
The case of the laptop taken home deserves treating explicitly, because it is frequent and settles badly after the fact: record in the register that the machine leaves the building, and sign the return agreement when it is handed over, not on the day of departure.
This touches the article on accounts and does not replace it: revoking an account and recovering an object are two different acts, done by two different people, and the commoner omission is the second because the first has been done.
Taking a machine out of the fleet
A replaced machine does not disappear: it stays powered somewhere, or it is sold, or it sleeps in a cupboard with its data on it.
The first decision is the disk, and it does not wait. Deleting files is not enough; the disk has to be erased or physically removed. A machine passed on, given away or traded in leaves with everything on it if nobody sees to it.
The second is the status. Out of the fleet means out of the register — as a line archived with its date rather than deleted: in two years somebody will ask where that machine went and the answer has to exist.
Resale and donation are both reasonable. What is not is the third route, which is the commonest: keeping the machine "just in case" without wiping it, without recording it, and without ever switching it on again — that is, creating precisely the ownerless machine of section three.
One useful exception: deliberately keep one or two spare machines, wiped, ready, and recorded in the register as such. An available loan machine turns a day-long outage into an hour-long one, and it is the best possible use of an outgoing desk.
The budget you can forecast three years out
With the six columns filled, something becomes possible that was not: saying in November what next year will cost in hardware.
The calculation is arithmetic and takes ten minutes. Count the machines whose warranty ends within twelve months, subtract those leaving the fleet, and you have the number to provision.
That figure has a property few IT budget lines have: it is defensible in front of somebody with no technical knowledge, because it rests on dates rather than on a technical opinion.
We publish no amount, here as in the companion article, for two cumulative reasons. The first is the one it gives itself: prices move and a dated figure would be wrong in six months. The second is that the total depends entirely on your fleet — its age, its size and your usage — and a quoted amount would be repeated as though it were a norm.
What we encourage instead is holding the line three years running. In the third year the forecast and the actual spend resemble each other, and that is when the register stops being an administrative chore and becomes a management tool.
What the register is worth on a day of failure
Everything above is foresight, and foresight sells badly. So here is what the file returns on the day something breaks.
It gives the serial number immediately — the service desk’s first question — and saves the hour spent turning a machine over under a desk by the light of a phone.
It says whether the machine is still under warranty, which changes the whole course of action: a call to the supplier rather than a quotation at a repairer, and a free part rather than a paid one.
It says what was on the machine and who used it, so which activity has stopped and who needs telling. That is the information most often missing in the first half hour of an incident.
And it says whether a spare exists. Those four answers fit on one spreadsheet row and represent, on an ordinary incident, the difference between a morning and three days.
What we do, and what we refuse
What we do is short and it transfers. We do the first pass with you — recording serial numbers, dates, owners — we build the warranty-end calendar, we propose the split into thirds, and we come back once a year before your budget season to update it.
We refuse to keep the register for you. It is the natural request and it is exactly what should not be accepted: a fleet whose inventory lives at the provider is a fleet you can no longer take back, and the argument is the same as for the change log elsewhere on this site.
We also refuse to price a renewal without the serial numbers in front of us. An estimate built on "about a dozen desks from three or four years ago" is an invented figure with a decimal point on it, and it mostly serves to get something signed.
And there is one thing to do this week without us, which takes an hour and decides all the rest: open a spreadsheet, put six headings on it, and walk the offices recording serial numbers. If you find a machine nobody claims — and you will find one — that hour has already paid.
Frequently asked questions
Do we really have to stop buying the whole fleet at once?
No: homogeneity remains the right advice and the companion article is correct. What to avoid is renewing more than a third of the fleet in the same year. Twelve machines from three close generations are repaired almost as easily as twelve identical ones, and the operational gap is far smaller than the shock of a block renewal three years later.
What exactly goes in the register?
Six columns: serial number, model, purchase date, warranty end, who uses it, where it is. The fourth is the one everybody omits because it takes a calculation or a check — and it is the only one that turns an inventory into a calendar. A spreadsheet of yours is enough, and it must not live at a provider.
Why the serial number rather than the machine name?
Because it does not change. The system name changes on reinstall, the position in the office changes at a move, the user changes more often than the hardware. The number is engraved, it appears on the invoice and the supplier recognises it — it is the first thing the service desk will ask for. Record it at unboxing: the label wears away where the hand rests.
When does the warranty start?
Not always the day you imagine: depending on the manufacturer and the channel it is the invoice date, the delivery date, or first power-on. A machine that sat five months in its box may have consumed five months of warranty — that is the reason not to buy ahead for a price. Check the extension too: cheap at purchase, expensive after, and it requires registering within a deadline.
What do we do with a machine nobody claims?
Switch it off the day you find it, not "one day". It carries two risks: company data nobody backs up, and a machine on your network nobody updates. Before switching it off, check what it carries — the first inventory often finds a role rather than a machine, such as the accounting department’s shared file.
How much should we provision each year?
Count the machines whose warranty ends within twelve months, subtract those leaving the fleet: that is your number. We publish no amount — prices move, and the total depends entirely on your fleet’s age, size and usage. Hold the line three years running and the forecast will begin to resemble the spend.
Where we come in
An hour spent recording serial numbers gives you what no quote contains. What the spreadsheet cannot work out alone is how many desks come off warranty this year.
- We do the first walk-round with you, desk by desk.
- We build the renewal calendar from the real dates.
- We leave you holding the register, because one we hold dies with the contract.
No renewal costing comes out of memory: an estimate made without the record is always wrong in the same direction.
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