When to Buy New Computers for Your Business

A: We feel your pain. Laying out thousands of dollars for equipment and software that can lose half its value by the time it's wired into an office is a tough pill for any business owner to swallow.

What's more, says James Gaskin, a Dallas-based innovation consultant, the issue of upgrading "keeps coming up every few years, or each time a small business goes out to buy a computer and finds that its new laptop uses a fresh [operating system] that's incompatible with what they run back at the office."

And remember, there's no need to replace all your computers together. Put the upcoming Windows 8 on one or two PCs and leave the rest running Windows 7. That should buy you another couple of years.

No: Good. PC towers are the pickup trucks of computing: They can do a lot of heavy lifting, and they'll last longer--as a rule five years.

Yes: Let your staff use their phones. For security reasons, write a company policy that spells out what, specifically, employees can't do with their personal phones. For instance: Downloading company files is grounds for termination.