Fallen out of love with your tech? Whether this is due to slow performance, short battery life, missing features, or poor condition, there are a variety of reasons for wanting a new device.
However, like other machines, our tech needs some TLC to keep it in peak shape and to extend its lifespan a little bit longer.
Essential care for your tech
Tech is expensive, with modern smartphones and laptops costing in the region of £1000. It is important to protect those investments with some basic care, including:
- Cleaning: Dust, grime and fingerprints are enemies of your tech, clogging ports, interfering with touchscreens or keyboards, and even damaging internal components.
Use microfibre cloths and a small amount of water to clean your devices. Be careful with household cleaning products; our tech was not designed to use these, and it can cause problems. - Charging habits: We’re all guilty of using a random charger that fits our device or leaving it plugged in for extended periods, such as overnight, to charge, but this can be detrimental to the longevity of battery health for our devices. Modern lithium-ion batteries prefer shorter and more frequent charges, aiming to keep charge between 20 and 80%.
A more important habit to get into is ensuring that the charger that comes with the device is used. This ensures that power is always supplied at the correct voltage and current, protecting the battery regardless of your charging habits. - Software and Application Updates: As we further digitalise, we use more applications and devices and, therefore, will have more updates to do. These update notifications may seem annoying. However, they are crucial for security and performance. They also bring new features to your device, often giving them a breath of fresh air and a sense of newness.
Make a habit of installing these updates as soon as they become available, and for the best methods, enable automatic updates in your device and app store settings. - Physical Protection: While this might seem obvious, it is important to keep your devices looking sleek to ensure you continue to love them. A case or sleeve is a simple and cheap way to prevent your device from accidentally dropping or getting scratched in a bag whilst also allowing you to customise your device to make it more unique to you.
Common Tech Care Mistakes to Avoid
- Neglecting backups: Our lives continue to be stored on these devices, especially our smartphones. Technical Director Matthew Jones explores this when discussing the Digitalisation of Driver’s Licenses and Other Government Records.
Using cloud services such as iCloud, OneDrive, and Google Drive allows your devices to regularly and automatically back up your important items to protect them from accidental deletion, hardware failure, device loss, or theft. - Ignoring overheating: If your device regularly feels excessively hot, it’s a sign that something is wrong. Overheating can shorten the lifespan of components, cause permanent damage and impact performance.
- Incorrect device choices: When purchasing your tech, there are so many choices to make, including manufacturer, size, storage capacity, processor, operating system and more. Getting this right when initially purchasing the device is crucial because you often cannot change any of these components on modern devices. Ensuring the device has enough performance for both now and future use allows you to keep it for longer, saving you time and money in the long run, even if the initial investment is more.
What to do when the love runs out?
Even with the best care, tech has a lifecycle that will eventually close, requiring a replacement.
This could be for a wealth of reasons, such as age or performance inadequate for its required use. These issues are important to mitigate as they can slow down productivity and leave your business vulnerable to security threats.
- New Devices: Upgrading to a shiny new device can boost efficiency, improve security and provide access to new features and capabilities. However, as with every investment, research is key to ensuring your requirements and preferences are catered to, or the device will bring limited improvements to your uses.
- Repurpose the Device: Whilst a device may not be fit for its original use, someone else might benefit from its use. For example, an engineer’s laptop may no longer be powerful enough to run 3D models, but it would bring significant performance increases to a team member in accounts workflow.
- Don’t be Scared to Purchase Refurbished: Refurbished devices can bring huge savings and can offer the same performance as new devices. However, ensure purchases are from a reputable source to guarantee a warranty, which is not guaranteed when purchasing from places such as eBay or Facebook marketplace.
How CTRL-S can help you:
CTRL-S can help you show all your team’s devices the love they deserve. Our services are designed to streamline your operations, provide the best tools for you and free up your team to focus on business functions.
We offer device procurement options to source the perfect equipment for your individual team members, proactive device management, to automatically manage software updates, backups and security software and remote support to quickly fix issues as they arise.
Get in touch today to give your devices a CTRL-S makeover.
