We are looking at options for the best way to keep our fleet of SW workstations refreshed and up to date, and I'm wondering how others handle this in their companies. We have about thirteen workstations and two EPDM servers (database and archive).

One idea I had was to use a capital lease. This would let us replace all the computers at once and run everyone off the same model (with some exceptions for simulation and rendering). This would simplify administration and we would be able to replace the computers at the end of the lease to keep up with SW's requirements. But even if I bought the best possible configuration based on the recommendations here and elsewhere, I'm sure everyone would start to feel the age of the computers before a three-year lease ran down.

If we were to do this, how would you recommend we future proof the computer in hopes it will work well with the SW 2018, etc? How long a lease would be best for SW?

We could stagger the leases, maybe do a third a year, which might help. But we would still have computer for the full term of the lease.

How do other companies handle this?