Business Device Support & Repair

You don’t have a broken laptop. You have an estate.

The call almost always comes about one machine. It won’t boot, or it keeps shutting itself down, and someone needs it back. That is a fair description of the emergency and a poor description of the problem: by the time a business phones about a device, it has usually been irritating somebody for months.

The money is rarely lost in the repair bill. It is lost in the gap between the day a machine became unreliable and the day somebody decided to do something about it. In that gap a person works slower without mentioning it, files get saved to the desktop “just for now” because the sync keeps hanging, and someone builds a private set of workarounds for their own computer. None of that reaches an invoice, which is why it runs on.

Business device support works the other way round. Instead of reacting to whichever machine failed last, you treat the laptops, desktops and Macs as one estate with a lifecycle: what you own, what state each machine is in, when each is due to go. Repairs, upgrades, swaps and retirements become planned work with a running order — cheaper and much calmer.

Repair or replace: what actually decides it

There is no formula, but a few factors genuinely move the decision.

• Age against role. A four-year-old machine that boots quickly and runs the software its user needs owes you nothing. A two-year-old bargain model, underpowered on day one, is already costing you.
• Wear item or board fault. Batteries, drives, fans, keyboards and hinges are consumables; replacing one on a sound machine is good economics. A board-level fault on an older device is another conversation.
• Part cost against remaining life. A part is worth fitting when the machine has years left to give. The same part on a machine you would replace next spring is money spent twice.
• Whether the operating system is still supported. If the hardware cannot run a version that still gets security updates, the question is settled.
• The cost of the person not working. The factor everyone leaves out, and usually the largest number on the list.

So a cheap repair on a tired machine is often the expensive option: a fix that fails again in six weeks costs you the first repair, the second diagnosis and two more interruptions. The opposite bias costs just as much — a sound machine that is merely slow can be transformed by fitting an SSD and adding memory, for a fraction of a replacement. Our guide on when to replace business computers works the decision through properly.

The bill you can see is not the cost you are paying

A repair is not competing with the price of a new laptop. It is competing with days of somebody’s output: the meetings they miss, the work queuing behind them, the colleague who covers.

So removing the wait matters more than optimising the repair, which is why swapping first beats a clever fix nearly every time: get the person onto a working machine, then deal with the broken one at a sensible pace. That is what a small spare pool is for. It only works when files and settings live in people’s accounts rather than on a local drive — then a swap is a sign-in, not a rescue.

Getting a device fixed when there is nowhere to walk in

There is no shopfront and no counter here. That sounds like a limitation until you price what a counter costs: somebody drives across London in work time, hands the machine over, then waits without it. Three routes instead, and we use whichever is cheapest.

Remote first. A good share of what gets reported as a hardware fault is not one — a failed update, a driver, a corrupted profile, a full disk. A remote session settles that without anyone travelling, and if it is hardware after all, we already know the model, the age and the fault.

On-site. When it needs hands, an engineer comes to the office, and a planned visit clears a written list of faults instead of one emergency. It is how the ten-person consultancy our team looks after runs its IT: laptops numbered, faults written against the number, a visit booked when the list is worth it.

Collection and return. When a job needs a bench and parts, we collect and return the machine.

The device is replaceable. What is on it may not be.

Hardware has a price list. Client records, case files and five years of a designer’s work do not. Full-disk encryption is the baseline, and the recovery key belongs somewhere the business can actually reach. That one detail decides whether a lost laptop is an inconvenience or a reportable breach.

During a repair, three questions are worth asking any provider. Who can read this drive? Does the fix touch the storage? Is there a current copy elsewhere before anything is erased? Where the drive itself has failed, the job stops being a repair and becomes data recovery — specialist work with its own risks.

Retirement is the step most businesses skip. A machine that leaves your building still holding readable data is a breach waiting for a date. Every retired device needs a secure wipe or a destroyed drive, a record of what was wiped and when, and responsible recycling. If you hold client or patient data, that record is part of your compliance position.

Three models are cheaper to run than fifteen

Estates sprawl one purchase at a time: whatever was on offer that month, whatever the last starter asked for, whatever a departing director left behind. Standardising on a handful of models changes the economics more than people expect. Spares and chargers become interchangeable. One build image covers the fleet. Docks and monitors match, so any desk works for anybody. Support gets quicker, because a fault on a familiar model is recognised rather than investigated. Getting there is a rule applied to the next twenty purchases, which is where standardised device setup and deployment does the work.

Mixed Windows and Mac is the normal shape

Nearly every office we look after runs both. The designers and the founder are on Macs, everyone else is on Windows, and the Apple side is usually left to whichever colleague seems most confident with it. That is an ordinary estate, not an exception, and it should not mean two providers arguing over whose fault the printer is. Apple hardware faults are repair work like any other; the accounts, encryption and access side sits under Mac support for business.

A machine that stops getting updates is a security problem

Windows 10 stopped receiving free security updates in October 2025. A machine still running it is not merely old; it is an unpatched device inside your network, and care taken elsewhere does not make up for that. Apple works to a similar rhythm, patching only recent macOS releases, so an older Mac falls off the same edge. Knowing a year ahead which machines can take the current version turns a nasty surprise into a budget line; our notes on upgrading a business to Windows 11 cover the checks worth running across an estate.

Where the individual jobs live

This page is the map; the jobs have their own pages. Laptop repair covers hinges, keyboards, batteries and charging ports, desktop and PC repair takes boot failures, power supplies and overheating, and board-level repair picks up faults deeper than a component swap. If you would rather not think about any of it, device cover folds into managed IT support — at which point the question stops being “who can fix this today” and becomes “what is due next quarter”.