At the end of August, the owner of a building-materials trading company in Tianhe asked us to come out and look. All 32 of his office PCs were Dell OptiPlex 3020 machines bought in 2018: i5-4590, 4 GB of RAM, a 500 GB mechanical drive. They took two or three minutes to boot, Excel sat there spinning, and entering a receipt in Kingdee KIS was slow enough that staff complained daily. The IT budget had already been approved for a full replacement, which at RMB 4,500 per branded commercial desktop came to RMB 144,000. The owner wanted a second opinion first: "Can these be repaired and still used?"
First test: where is the machine actually stuck?
We pulled five machines and benchmarked them. The results were tightly clustered:
| Metric | Measured | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Boot to a usable desktop | 117–134 seconds | Mechanical drive plus startup software; the disk is the bottleneck |
| CrystalDiskMark sequential read | 102 MB/s | Normal for a 5400 rpm drive, but far too slow for 2026 software |
| 4K random read | 0.52 MB/s | The real culprit: system-drive 4K performance, about 1/60 of an SSD |
| Memory at idle after boot | 3.4 GB of 4 GB (85%) | Not enough RAM, so the page file thrashes the mechanical drive |
| CPU load, everyday office work | 15–25% | The quad-core i5-4590 handles OA, Excel and Kingdee fine, not a bottleneck |
Conclusion: the CPU and motherboard were nowhere near end of life. The bottleneck was 100% the combination of mechanical drive and 4 GB of RAM. That pairing was mainstream in 2018, but Windows 10/11 in 2026, plus a domestic OA client and a browser that starts at 300 MB per tab, has drained it dry. This was the classic "swap two parts and it is back to full speed" case. No need to swap the machines.
Option comparison: upgrade versus replace
| Item | Batch upgrade plan | Replace everything |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware | 240 GB SATA SSD (Zhitai SC001, RMB 299 each) plus DDR3 8 GB (2×4 GB kit, RMB 120 per machine) | Branded commercial desktop, i5 / 16 GB / 512 GB SSD |
| Cost per unit | Roughly RMB 380 per unit in parts and labor at batch pricing (the SSD and memory list at RMB 419 before the volume discount) | About RMB 4,500 per unit |
| Total for 32 units | RMB 12,160 | RMB 144,000 |
| Downtime | Assembly-line work, 25 minutes per unit, finished over one weekend | Data migration of 1–2 hours per unit, roughly a week |
| Expected result | 19-second boot, smooth OA and Kingdee, three more years of service | Fully smooth, five to eight years |
| Data migration | System clone with DiskGenius; the original drive becomes a storage disk and keeps the data | Per-machine user data migration, considerably more work |
Our package recommendation was a split: upgrade all 32 units for about RMB 12,000, then spend RMB 45,000 on new machines for the eight heavy users in finance and design. Total investment RMB 57,000, which is RMB 87,000 less than replacing everything, and the heavy users get a full performance jump on top. The owner approved it on the spot.
Running the batch as an assembly line: 32 units in two days
A batch upgrade is not "the single-machine repair, done 32 times." It has to be pipelined. Here was our work order, run over one Saturday and Sunday with three people:
- Pre-mastering (Friday night): install Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021, the company OA client, Kingdee KIS, common office software and activation, and capture a standard image. All 32 machines are identical in hardware, so one master image covers every one of them.
- Station A, teardown and cloning (two people): attach the original drive to the cloning rig and clone partition by partition with DiskGenius, system partition and user data only, skipping the page file. Average 18 minutes per machine.
- Station B, assembly and expansion (one person): fit the SSD into the 2.5-inch bay, add memory as two 4 GB sticks in dual channel, clean the dust and repaste the cooler (this batch of fans was badly fouled, so we did it while the case was open), then format the original drive and refit it as a storage disk.
- Station C, acceptance (runs through Sunday): time the boot, test the OA login, test a Kingdee entry, check each user's desktop files and browser bookmarks, and update the asset register with a new label.
One detail worth copying: the original mechanical drive stays in the machine, formatted as drive D for storage. Employee files never move, the SSD carries only the OS and applications, and data-migration risk is zero. On Monday morning the desktops and files were exactly where they had left them, and the computers were simply faster.
Acceptance data: the Monday follow-up
| Metric | Before upgrade | After upgrade | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boot to a usable desktop | 127 seconds (mean) | 19 seconds | 6.7× |
| 4K random read | 0.52 MB/s | 31.8 MB/s | 61× |
| Kingdee KIS receipt entry | 2–4 seconds per line | Instant | Staff verdict: "it's a new computer" |
| Browser with 15 tabs open | Frozen | Smooth, 61% memory in use | n/a |
| Complaints per day | 11 in the week before | 0 in the week after | n/a |
Which machines deserve a batch upgrade, and which do not
Our criteria for enterprise IT procurement:
- Worth upgrading: CPU is 4th-generation Core i5 or better (or Ryzen 2000+), the motherboard is healthy, and the workload is pure office. After an SSD and more RAM, these give the biggest experience gain at the lowest marginal cost, and three more years is realistic.
- Not worth upgrading: dual-core low-voltage chips (an i3-3110M, say), a board with an intermittent fault, a DDR2 platform, or a workload that has moved to local AI inference or large design software. Replace those. Upgrading is money down the drain.
- The arithmetic: upgrade cost divided by replacement cost. Below 15%, with three years of expected life left, upgrade. In this case 380 divided by 4,500 is 8.4%, which is a very good deal.
ACCPC offers batch computer upgrades, batch builds and whole-machine procurement for enterprises: free on-site assessment, a proposal with the old-versus-new arithmetic, weekend batch work that does not stop the business, and a three-month warranty after the upgrade. We also do Guangzhou computer wholesale and custom assembly, with channel pricing above 10 units. Call 020-39029800.