A Mac mini and a Lenovo laptop rebuilt for an executive office

An office we already look after

This is the UK base of an international holdings company — a small executive office with no in-house IT, which is why we’re on the end of the phone for it. That relationship is written up separately as on-site and remote support for a Wimbledon office. What follows is one project from inside it, over about a month in the summer.

Two machines, replaced properly

Two machines. Not a floor of them — a Mac mini and a Lenovo laptop, each needing a different kind of work.

The Mac mini was new out of the box. Our team set it up, brought the operating system up to date, and migrated the data across from the machine it was replacing. Then the part that actually matters to an office like this: Microsoft 365 configured, the email accounts set up on it, and the existing mail exported from the old setup and migrated in. A new computer with an empty mailbox is not a working computer for anyone who runs a business by email.

The Lenovo laptop went the other way round. It needed a fresh operating system — a clean install rather than a tidy-up — which is straightforward until you remember where the mail was. It sat in PST archives: Outlook’s local file format, which by design lives on one hard drive and nowhere else. Those archives were migrated and uploaded back into the account after the rebuild, so the older correspondence sits in the mailbox rather than in a file that only exists on one machine.

Fitted around a travel diary

The chairman travels. That set the shape of the work more than anything technical did: six attendances across the month, roughly seven hours on site plus remote time, each slot booked around when the office was actually occupied. Work that could be done between visits was done between visits, so the on-site hours went on the things that needed hands on the hardware.

Signed off with a test send

Before we left it, mail was sent through the new mailboxes and checked. It’s a small step and it takes two minutes, but “the migration completed” and “your email works” are not the same statement, and only one of them is any use to the client. Both machines were handed back in a state the office could sit down and use.

The honest footnote

This work was delivered by our team. We’ve anonymised the client — but the two machines, the migrations and the schedule they had to fit are real, and the job was exactly the size described: two computers, one month, no fleet. Setting up new hardware and moving people onto it without losing their mail is everyday device deployment work for us, and the Apple half of it falls under Mac support for business. Getting the mail across intact is usually the part that decides whether the whole thing felt smooth — which is why we treat email migration and setup as the main event rather than the last step.