According to a new study conducted by Techaisle, SMBs that are using their PCs for more than three years in hopes of saving money are actually paying more in maintenance and repair costs, as well as security and system failures.

The report also found up to a 58 percent increase in virus incidents with PCs over three years old, and once infected, the data shows that there is a 23 percent increase in related downtime to fix desktop systems and 22 percent increase for notebooks.

According to the report, the number of SMBs suffering from crashes with PCs less than three years old is small in comparison to those with older systems. Around 33 percent of SMBs faced hard-drive failures in their older systems against 8 percent with newer systems.

Motherboard failures affected 14 percent of older PCs compared to 4 percent of newer PCs, and network card breakdowns were encountered by 26 percent of older PCs as opposed to 6 percent of younger systems, the report mentioned. Furthermore, 49 percent of those surveyed experienced power supply failures after three years compared with 11 percent before that time.

Adding more to it, 26 percent of small-sized businesses and 43 percent of medium-sized businesses plan to keep their PCs longer than normal even though the average SMB IT budget grew 4.6 percent.

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