Office workers: 'The best way to upgrade a PC is to smash it'

Huh?

Where I work and if your Laptop breaks you get a 3/4 year old discarded one in exchange.

For example, I use a Lenovo T500. If that goes 'phut' I get an X31 in exchange.

Upgrade? Yeah right.

I'd guess that in these financially challenged times my company is not alone here.

Thumbs down... Off with his head I say

WEEE

So, in Blighty we have fewer defunct PCs to recycle than our EU counterparts. Then again we are probably depriving some poor bugger in India of a job, sweating & slaving over a motherboard extracting components whilst inhaling fumes which are probably carcinogenic. Hardware & software manufacturers, are culpable, but so is the consumer; we consume and then cast off what's no longer "good enough". Perhaps the economic woes we are experiencing now will reduce our greed for "new". I doubt it somehow, but one can wish.

Not European

I have found this to be true in the US as well. I'm about on a yearly Blackberry-replacement cycle (although the last time actually resulted in a downgrade--oops) due to to hardware destruction, and it's also how I got my laptop replaced. They haven't been exactly deliberate, but I'm way less careful with corporate resources than with my own.

Fired...

... quicker that you can say "gross misconduct". After all, it's easy enough to "drop" a laptop, but how are you going to render a desktop machine unusable?

What do they mean by "past-it"?

Most modern PCs browse the web and edit documents.

By past-it, do they mean no longer able to run the resource-hogging OS that was last put onto it, or does the OS (probably WIndows) just need reinstalling?

Certainly in the case of office desktop PCs, you would probably find that in the majority of cases, an upgrade is not actually necessary unless there are reliability issues.

The issue is far more complex than this simplistic analysis would have us believe.

Mr. Hammer

That's what my boss calls it, after he's seen me tear into many a malfunctioning piece of hardware with a 64oz sledge. I've even smashed cases after they've drawn blood one too many times. I smash power supplies and firewalls to ensure the broken damn things don't get fetched out of the garbage and reused to cause more grief. Especially network gear where it can cause tons of problems for everyone else on the network. I've also shattered a mismarked metric tap for the same reason.

It's impossible to get something fixed, but it's a lot easier to get it replaced.

You are missing a major factor

First, the level of workspace surveillance practiced in the UK is way above Germany (it will be outright illegal there) and France (while the Peugeot porn case did not create a precedent it certainly made IT managers think twice). As a result rather unsurprisingly Joe Average UK worker is expecting that his PC is keylogged and reporting every last keystroke all the way till the one before it broke to IT.

Second, in France you are expected to deliver, not to clock hours. In fact the less hours it takes you the more cudos you get from your colleagues. This is the part which the Brits miserably fail to understand about the BIG LUNCH culture. You take a BIG LUNCH because you can and you manage to do your job in _LESS_ time than Joe Average overworked British office worker. So if your PC does not do the job you are actually royally screwed both in terms of getting the job done and in terms of pecking order within the company.

Same in Germany. German expectation that business case as an argument works is rather unsurprising.

In the UK however, you live by the timesheet and your manager gets an arousal from it. So having a crap PC is actually good for you. You still clock the same hours (usually 20%+ more than your French or German colleagues), you eat indigestible sandwiches at your desk, you bitch at people who take a proper lunch and overall - you do less work. A crap PC really helps you here by providing an excuse to do so.

Overall, I am not surprised that the average UK worker is not taking a hammer to the PC in cases where his counterpart in Germany, France or USA would not hesitate for a second to do so.

the best way to an upgrade

is with a screwdriver followed by

1) some "nudges" to the hdd while copying a large file

2) applying varying amounts of charge to the chips / dimms on the mobo,

using a sledgehammer is just so passé

Why use a sledgehammer?

When a dropper will do?

Just squeeze a Pasteur pipette full of salt water into the ventilator holes about where you reckon the CPU fan is located.

The joke's on them

We've got stacks of old kit that we can replace broken and damaged kit with. You break it and you might end up with something that's even older. Just because you break it don't mean there's any money to replace it.

Who's budget is it anyway

I've found in companies I've worked for in the past that user PC's/laptops never got replaced as doing so came out of the business unit (sales, accounts, HR etc) budget for that employee, whereas the cost of maintaining an out of warranty PC came from IT's budget.

Plus if you don't automatically replace machines after X years, once one person might get a new PC, everyone wants one. Which becomes a political, morale destroying minefield.

Bad workmen

always blame their tools.

Often plain old envy and the British disease

Yes, some workers are saddled with PCs not up to the task which should be upgraded, but a lot is often pure envy that someone has something better which isn't actually necessary for their job.

That is not an excuse though for the piss-poor, "use it until it totally fails", attitude of some tight-fisted British companies which makes one want to take a hammer to it or push it off the edge of a table. That often applies to infrastructure, furniture and vehicles as much as PCs.

There's no greater incitement than directors and managers getting all they want and giving themselves massive bonuses while refusing to replace a dodgy mouse, a sticky keyboard, or a wonky chair.

Judicious application of power

If you need to destroy a machine in a way that doesn't look too obvious, the use of a laptop power supply and a couple of bits of wire normally* does the trick.

Most support staff have neither the inclination nor the tools to diagnose a motherboard failure in any detail. They certainly aren't going to start replacing individual chips.

Before embarking on this course of action, it would be advisable to ensure that you won't be getting the oldest and crappest machine that IT can find covered in dust in the darkest recesses of their storage area as a replacement.

* Not that I ever would do such a thing you understand, this suggestion is merely for "educational purposes".

Blue pencil

Surely this needs an edit:

"Despite being saddled with more past-it PCs than others, UK office workers are far less likely to take a hammer to their phone or laptop than their Gallic peers."

Corrected version:

"UK office workers are being saddled with more past-it PCs than others because they are far less likely to take a hammer to their phone or laptop than their Gallic peers."

Of course, in-work surveillance, as pointed out, makes it less likely. No wonder British industry is always said to be less efficient than that of France or Germany.

Replacing `old` kit

For several months, some members of `Damagement` have been beating the drums for new lappies. Executive Manglement said: "NO, tighten your belts. No new toys for you!!!!!"

Well, it seems like one of those MBA's must have read this article, Why, you may ask???

My office is on the 4th floor, and I was called down to the first floor stairwell. There, lying at the bottom of the stairs, were at least a dozen busted lappies. From the damage done to them, it looks like they took at least a one floor drop. From the labels on the back, some of them appeared to have been used by those complaining members of damagement. I just heard the chief executive mangler say that those busted lappies will NOT be replaced. There was something mentioned about digging out those old Amstrads that have been gathering dust; or they can buy a new one with their own money.