Hi everyone,

I am thinking along the lines of Wendell and Ken as above.

I tried to do some searching for computer failure rates. It does not look like there is a lot of information out there. One article was looking at failure rates of servers, which might roughly parallel PCs, they indicated about a 5% hardware failure in the first year, going up to about 20% in the sixth year. It seems like many of the used PCs available on the eBay or similar are 3 years old. This would suggest they probably have quite a bit of life left in them.

Items that fail most frequently are, not surprisingly, hard drives. However, power supply was #2 on the list. Everything else seemed much less likely. One source indicated that the failure rates for "namebrand" PCs was quite a bit lower than "white box" PCs. I imagine this primarily would reflect power supply problems.

I had put new hard drives in most of our older PCs several years ago. I did look at SSD prices, they have gotten amazingly cheap, they will probably be the next swap out.

I also checked eBay for Windows 10 Pro licensing, as indicated above they can be amazingly cheap. Not really certain about their legality, but if the free upgrade does not work, that is probably the way to go.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts.

Gene

Gene Nallin MD solo family practice with one PA Cumberland, Md