BrandPost: 5 Reasons to Put Your Old PCs Out to Pasture

It’s tempting with the rapid rise of remote work due to COVID-19 to think that out of sight is out of mind when it comes to your PCs. If your employees can still hop on a video call, they must be working at maximum productivity. The truth is much more complicated.

If your organization, like so many others, has a four-year PC refresh cycle, the new wave of remote work should, if anything, accelerate that cycle. Even before the current global health crisis, users were becoming  more mobile than ever before, raising risks around security, flexibility, efficiency and efficacy.

While the precautionary and voluntary remote work continues, IT staff is also facing unprecedented challenges. Onboarding employees, supporting current ones, and maintaining systems for maximum productivity are challenges they are struggling to solve, all while trying to stay afloat with their higher-level duties.

Managing aging systems at scale is difficult when everyone is in one place, and with that becoming rare, the issues multiply exponentially. No business can afford unplanned down time on a regular basis, and employees can grow increasingly frustrated as their productivity drops.

“Aged systems are costing businesses in terms of lost productivity and security risk, and with much of the workforce remote now, IT managers are faced with even bigger maintenance and support challenges.” says  Matt Unangst, Director of Commercial Client Business at AMD.

Speaking of aging systems, TechAisle found way back in 2016 that it can cost as much as $1,700 per year to maintain PCs older than 4 years^[1]. Those kinds of hidden costs can creep up on a business, raising TCO.

If your organization still sees PC refreshes as a luxury, try seeing it instead as an opportunity to unlock immense improvements in productivity, performance and collaboration. The AMD Ryzen™ PRO 4000 family of processors and partner platforms, for example, cover all the bases for any organization’s modern computing needs, delivering a straight line to productivity and PC modernization.

^[1]Small Business PC Study, TechAisle, 2016

Still need convincing? Here are five great reasons to perform a PC refresh now.

Turbocharge performance. Here’s the new reality of work in 2020: increased complexity, juggling workloads, mega multi-tasking, and operating remotely. Offering the most cores and threads in a mobile business processor for ultra-thin notebooks with the Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U processor, AMD Ryzen PRO processors deliver top-of-line performance and responsiveness across a wide variety of workloads, from crunching data to rendering videoconference calls to compiling code.^[3]

For example, the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U platform delivers up to 37% faster performance running Microsoft Office in PCMark 10 Applications benchmark compared to the previous generation Ryzen 5 PRO 3700U processor.^[1] In addition, the same AMD platform offers up to 19% faster performance in Microsoft Word, up to 77% faster performance in Excel, and up to 27% faster performance in PowerPoint versus the previous generation.

This leadership performance comes without compromise to battery life. AMD Ryzen PRO processors help to maximize workforce productivity by offering up to 20 hours of battery life on a premium platform.^[2]

Improve security features. Protecting sensitive corporate data has never been more important. Modern notebooks and PCs are often never fully turned off, raising the threat for stolen data. AMD Ryzen PRO processors, featuring AMD PRO security, deliver a multi-layered approach to security features, helping protect data from sophisticated attacks and avoiding downtime. In addition to a set of silicon and firmware-level security features, AMD Ryzen Pro processors employ AMD Memory Guard system memory encryption to help reduce the threat of physical memory attacks even if the laptop is left in standby mode.

Make IT management a breeze. IT departments, already spread thin, need all the help they can get with supporting remote workers. AMD PRO Manageability is a full cross-platform feature set enabled on all PRO processors that simplifies remote device management. With AMD PRO manageability, IT can manage a mixed environment of PCs in their fleet with ease, from simplified deployment with Windows^® Autopilot, to efficient patch management to address security vulnerabilities, to ongoing management for a wide range of system issues.  AMD Ryzen PRO processors also fully enable support for Microsoft Endpoint Manager – a cloud-powered set of management tools to provision, deploy, manage, and secure endpoints and applications across an organization.  

Boost efficiency. Simply put, organizations need the latest hardware to drive today’s modern software experiences. There are also significant stealth costs associated with legacy systems, including on-going maintenance and repair services, that chip away at the bottom line and exceed the cost of  upgrading PCs or laptops. New PCs powered by Ryzen PRO processors help boost efficiency by delivering leadership performance and up to 20hours of battery life on a premium platform^[2] – driving up productivity by eliminating downtime that comes with aged hardware issues such as long start up time, frequent crashes, and shortened battery life, and all things being equal, by helping to lower TCO with reduced power consumption vis a vis a high efficiency processor. 

With enterprise-grade quality, long-term reliability, and planned software stability, new PCs with Ryzen PRO processors can bring peace of mind to organizations and are a logical choice  for today’s remote and highly mobile workforce.

Choose wisely and benefit. Whether it’s a notebook or desktop, AMD Ryzen PRO processors are available in a wide range of commercial OEM products across varying price points, giving enterprises an array of options to accommodate different budgets and user needs.

Even during a pandemic, business keeps moving faster than ever. Your organization can’t afford to slow down when there are so many options to keep your competitive edge and employee productivity high.

To learn more visit the following links:

https://www.amd.com/en/where-to-buy/commercial-systems

https://www.amd.com/en/processors/laptop-processors-for-business

https://www.amd.com/en/ryzen-pro

https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/pro-technologies

https://community.amd.com/community/amd-business/blog/2020/05/07/the-new-standard-for-modern-business-notebooks-amd-ryzen-pro-mobile-processors

^[2] A properly configured HP EliteBook 835 G7 with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U Processor, gets up to 24 hours of MM14 battery life: https://press.hp.com/us/en/press-releases/2020/hp-provides-ultimate-office-experience-at-home.html  Actual battery life will vary based on several factors, including, but not limited to: system configuration and software, settings, product use and age, and operating conditions. AMD has not independently tested or verified the battery life claim. See www.bapco.com for additional details. RNP-28

^[3] As of February 2020.“Most Cores and Threads” in a mobile business  processor for ultrathin notebooks.  RNP-19

*Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) – the cost to purchase + cost of operation. Electricity is a cost of operation, therefore higher efficiency processors can enable a lower TCO than low efficiency processors that use more power.

Beth Stackpole has reported on business and technology for more than 20 years.