Most business computers do not fail all at once. A laptop may still handle email and documents but take longer to start, struggle during video calls, or run out of battery halfway through the day.

For many office computers, three to five years is a sensible replacement range. Start reviewing each device when it reaches three years old, then decide whether it should be replaced soon or kept for another year or two.

Some computers will need to be replaced sooner because they cannot install a supported operating system, no longer run important software properly, or require frequent repairs. Others may remain useful beyond five years, especially in roles that only involve light office work.

Age helps you plan, but the computer’s security, condition, and suitability for the employee should determine when it is replaced.

By the time an employee hands in their notice, the decisions that will make their departure clean or messy have already been made. They were made in the first weeks of the person’s tenure, when nobody was paying close attention because the new hire had just arrived and there were a hundred other things to do. A shared login here, a quick SaaS sign-up there, a personal laptop used until the company hardware arrived. By month six, none of those feel like decisions at all. They feel like how things are.

This post covers what’s really going wrong when offboarding takes three weeks, the four onboarding shortcuts that guarantee a painful exit, how to retrofit hygiene on the team you already have, and what your IT provider should be doing at onboarding that probably isn’t happening.