Computer wholesaler - recommendations?

[tim....]

For corporates you have to consider the tax situation

A repair is 100% deductible, a new item can only be re-claimed using the capital depreciation rules

tim

[The Natural Philosopher]

BUT you can reclaim the expense of the unit you replace: if its scrapped the value goes to zero. Whether its 5 year amortization is up or not.

[John Rumm]

A new machine is 100% deductible in the sense the total cost comes out of pre-tax profits. The ongoing expense of the depreciation is then scheduled over time. So a repair will add not capital to asset value of the business, whereas a hardware purchase will. (many accountants will depreciate software purchases 100% on in the first year as well - arguing it has no resale value)

[Fred]

Just wanted to say thanks very much folks for all your contributions, some excellent information and suggestions have been forthcoming from the members of the group and it will not go unheeded. Cheers :-)

[Jack]

Difference between revenue and capital accounts. Many years ago I worked in a grain store bagging up 25 or 50kg sacks. There was a mini hoist to lift it to shoulder height, then you poped it on your shoulder and dropped it on a pallet. THe mini-hoist was hydraulic and leaked like ....ery. Plenty of fluid to fill it up was available to produce a brief respite. From the prices I was given, it was easy to work out that if you bought a new one, it would pay for itself in six months from the savings on hydraulic fluid. I was told I didn't understand accounting and company policy. They could buy any amount of the fluid through the revenue budget without authorisation (or question), but a new piece of kit was captial expenditure and needed loads of paperwork, committees and other authorising rubbish - so needless to say, the old one stayed and I left.

[Rick Hughes]

It's a way of generating future phone sales ... people will upgrade rather than pay to have battery changed.

Apple have always been 'different' ... my first business computer was a Mac SE30 ... and it was great at the time, if Jobs had had better foresight, he could have licensed MacOS and then all desk top computers would share common software, and things would have been cheaper & faster much sooner.

At that time (1992) it was only corporate internal mail (Qmail) internet email had not yet taken off ... there was no web, Mosaic did not arrive until 1994 ... evolved to become Netscape, and had over 90$ browser share ... there was no IE at the time .... Bill gates did not see the need for a browser !

As it happened after 3 hardware refreshes, the company I worked for (like most Mac based companies) could no longer afford to continue with Mac's .... the price per processing hp was far inferior to basic PC's (Windows 3.1) plus business apps tended to be at least 18-24 months behind on Mac platform (probably Microsoft marketing tactics)

It seemed so strange to see hundreds of Mac's .... mainly Quadra & G3's , being thrown into skips.

Macs were easier to set up network wise, and the learning curve was very small ... just put them on a desk and people started to use them with no problem. From late 90's onwards only Media houses continued with Macs .......very expensive graphics tools.

It was a number of years before Mac's gained favor again.

Windows 7 is probably only now getting close to Mac OS of 20 years ago (but much faster of course)

[Andy Burns]

So an Apple monopoly or Apple homogeneous landscape wouldn't have been as bad a thing as a Microsoft one? As for anything being cheaper (or faster bar the odd exception) from Apple, pull the other one.

[D.M.Chapman]

Surely one of the reasons windows has got a bit of a reputation is due to it having to run on near infinite combinations of hardware. MacOS is much easy for Apple to test/maintain as it only (officially) supports a very small, very controlled set of hardware.

Had MacOS been licensed to others would it have ended up just like Windows anyway?

Also, would a massive Apple monopoly be any better than the massive microsoft one we have now? Not convinced, and I'm a massive apple fan :)

Darren

[Bob Eager]

A megamalophile?

[NT]

Computer fairs sell cheap stuff. Always with reasons why, but at the end of the day you can resell it in systems you've put together. Ebay is the other cheap supplier.

FWWI I dont agree that there's no markup to be made, tehre's a fair bit.

NT

[tony sayer]

I think you'll find that you may well be better off selling your services to small companies for maintenance and support. The number of small and larger firms I go to and see staff struggling with poor IT systems is surprising large..

[chris French]

Yup, and often it's not the obvious looking things that you need to work on. As suggested getting manual pdf online made life much easier

IIRC On my old Acer you ignore the obvious scews on the bottom, undo the ones holding the screen hinges to the base, which means you can remove the panel along the top of the keyboard area, which means you can then get to the inards from the top.

On the topic of over heating laptops, when fixing a dodgy screen problem, I took the chance to clean out the CPU heatisnk, it was very clogged with fluff

[Nick]

Not strictly what you were asking, but have you considered appealing against the Incapacity Benefit decision? Successful appeals are apparently running at around 40 - 45% of applications.