Think your organization’s benefiting by making users limp along with their old laptops a bit longer? Well, you’re probably wrong, says a new study.

Extending the use of laptops two years beyond the traditional three-year life span costs companies an average of $1,050 per machine — more than the replacement cost, says the Northboro, Mass.-based firm J. Gold Associates, LLC.

The added expenses include a significant increase in repair costs due to old age, and the end of three-year warranty periods, it said.

The use of outdated equipment also costs a company about $9,600 per laptop user in lost worker productivity over the two-year period, the study concluded.

Some additional key findings include:

• The cost to repair a failed notebook while under warranty is $1070
• The cost to repair a failed notebook not under warranty is $1525
• The per machine “Failure Tax” for each notebook deployed in the organization is $138 in the first year and increases dramatically throughout the life of the machine, but will change based on variations in machine failure rates from different manufacturers and/or models.

Tags: cost, J Gold Associates, laptops, life span, repair, replacement, warranty