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Repair before replace

A failed fan doesn't turn a £1,200 laptop into a £0 laptop. It turns it into a laptop with a £15 problem.

That's most of this post in two sentences. The rest is about when it's true, when it isn't, and how an IT team can act on it without ending up with a cupboard full of dead ThinkPads nobody dares throw out.

The old model

For most of the last decade, a lot of corporate IT ran on a simple loop: three-year refresh, wipe it, recycle it, buy new. That made sense when laptops were fairly cheap, buying them was easy, and an engineer's time was seen as worth more than the hardware.

A few things have changed since then:

  • Business laptops cost more, and well-specced ones cost a lot more.
  • A five-year-old machine is often still perfectly good for email, Teams and a browser full of tabs. It hasn't become five years less useful.
  • Supply problems have made "just order another one" less of a sure thing.
  • Plenty of the work around a repair, like reimaging and setup, can be automated now, so the labour costs less than it did.
  • Organisations have sustainability targets, and keeping kit in use for longer is one of the easiest ways to hit them.

None of that means you should repair everything. It means the maths deserves a second look.

Broken isn't the same as worthless

IT has tended to treat hardware as one of two things. Working, so it's an asset. Broken, so it's e-waste.

Think of it as parts instead and the picture changes. Say you've got 200 of the same Dell, Lenovo or HP model. Most failures are boring and cheap:

  • Failed fan: £10 to £20 for a new one.
  • Dead battery: £30 to £60.
  • Broken keyboard or cracked screen: take one from a donor machine.
  • Failed SSD: swap it, as long as it isn't soldered to the board.
  • Cosmetic damage: usually doesn't matter.
  • Dead motherboard: the machine is done, but its screen, keyboard, cooling, hinges and chassis aren't.

That "dead" laptop could be £100 to £300 worth of future spare parts. And the more of one model you run, the more those parts are worth to you.

Where to draw the line

You don't want a technician spending three hours fixing a £250 laptop. The rule I'd work to is roughly this: repair when it costs clearly less than replacing, and the machine will still have a useful life once it's fixed.

In practice:

  • £20 fan and 15 minutes of someone's time? Yes.
  • £40 battery on a machine with two more years of support? Yes.
  • £60 keyboard? Probably.
  • £250 motherboard on a £300 laptop? Probably not.
  • A CPU that can't meet Windows 11 or the security baseline? No. Don't bring it back just because you can.

That last one matters most, so I'll come back to it.

The cheap fixes nobody bothers with

Batteries are the clearest example of a machine being written off too early. Everything works, but it lasts 45 minutes off the charger, so someone calls it end of life. Fit a new battery and it's a perfectly good work laptop again.

Fans are the same. A clogged-up cooling system is an even sillier reason to bin a computer. Someone reports their laptop is "slow". You check, and it's thermal throttling. Clean the heatsink and fan, redo the thermal paste if it needs it, and you've effectively upgraded the machine for the price of someone's time. It's one of the most satisfying fixes there is.

A better lifecycle

Instead of new, three years, bin, a laptop's life can look more like this:

  • New, as someone's main machine
  • Redeployed for a second life
  • Repaired or refurbished
  • Kept as a parts donor
  • Recycled properly at the very end

If you run 500 identical laptops, you might deliberately keep 10 or 20 aside as donors. One machine with a dead board can give you a screen, keyboard, trackpad, speakers, webcam, cooling, hinges, cables, screws, and sometimes RAM and an SSD. That's a lot of parts you don't have to order.

It gives you flexibility too. Someone leaves? Their machine goes back in the pool. Someone needs a laptop for a week? There's refurbished stock. Someone's laptop dies? Swap it straight away and fix the broken one afterwards, so they're back working in minutes, not days.

Laptops stop belonging to one person for a fixed three years and become part of a fleet. That's a much better way to manage them.

It changes what you buy

Once you know you'll repair, repairability becomes something you check before you buy. Not just "what's the unit price?" but "how fixable is this?":

  • Can the battery, keyboard and screen be replaced?
  • Can you get at the fan and heatsink easily?
  • Is the SSD socketed? What about the RAM, where that's realistic?
  • Are genuine parts and repair guides available?
  • How long will the manufacturer keep updating the BIOS and firmware?

A £1,000 laptop that lasts six or seven years can work out a lot cheaper than two £700 laptops at three years each.

The catch: support

Every machine really has three lifetimes:

  • Mechanical: does it physically work?
  • Economic: is fixing it cheaper than replacing it?
  • Support and security: can it still get the OS, firmware and security updates the organisation needs?

The third one always wins. A laptop that works perfectly but can't run your supported version of Windows, can't get security updates, or doesn't have a supported TPM or CPU has reached the end of its working life. Keeping it on the network isn't a saving. It's a risk.

Even then, it doesn't have to go in the skip. The motherboard is obsolete. The screen, keyboard, fan and hinges probably aren't.

A process, not a cupboard

So the old IT cupboard full of donor machines makes sense again. The difference is doing it on purpose: known models, known parts, known failure modes, a cost limit for repairs, a clear support cut-off, and donor stock tracked in the asset register like everything else.

That isn't making do because there's no money. It's managing a fleet properly. And it's the bit of IT I enjoy most: work out what's actually wrong, fix it for a sensible price, and get someone back to work.