[Kirby64]

What company upgrades their windows PCs? They give them exactly as shipped. IT department is not wasting time swapping out RAM or SSDs. And they certainly are not upgrading them over time. You just replace the entire PC if you go to 'swap' it.

[msisk6]

I work for a little company called Boeing and all our PCs (desktops and laptops) are Dell and our IT center will upgrade SSD, memory, and even do repairs like swapping out motherboards.

Probably helps the IT center folks are actually employees of Dell and this service is part of the deal Boeing has with Dell. Lots of big companies have similar deals with their hardware vendors.

[Kirby64]

Interesting. I’ve worked for company’s that were all Dell shops as well and were similarly large and they had no such deal. You got whatever PC was available (like two options, one large and one small) and no choice beyond that. If you were special and could adequately plead your case, you maybe got a desktop for the extra RAM which was special order.

Why would you even want a SSD or memory upgrade? By the time you’re out of memory, the cpu upgrade is typically worth it.

[msisk6]

A month or so back I was hanging out at the IT center waiting for my laptop to be re-imaged (my Windows bootloader went "missing or invalid") when an engineer brought his laptop in to be upgraded from 16GB to 32GB. The IT tech took it in the back, did the job, and brought it back out in about 10 minutes.

I think part of the problem is all our laptops have smart card slots on them, and that limits the available options.

[prmoustache]

> Why would you even want a SSD or memory upgrade? By the time you’re out of memory, the cpu upgrade is typically worth it.

Not necessarily. Sometimes the default laptop sizing comes with a standard usage in mind but more space and ram is justified for other roles. Sure you could have different laptop models but if you are fine with just more ram and disk space why not?

[prmoustache]

I have had an upgrade maxing out the memory of my works thinkpad. It was a number of years ago, 2020 or 2021. Might be less common these days for obvious technical reasons (solderd ram on many models) but if the hardware allows it why not?

[kyawzazaw]

my school IT department does this but it's a small university

[0x1d7]

IME edu operates much differently than [US] corporations which use a 3 - 5 year deprecation schedule. Edu is more 'run it until it doesn't'.