I'm in the position of having both the mission critical & regular servers. Our mission critical machine, an app server that runs about 90% of our business, we lease so it gets recycled every five years. For us, it's worth the extra cost to have equipment under warranty with parts guaranteed next business day and a local IBM rep who can be on-site within an hour if something goes wrong. The less critical machines we actually plan to push out to ten years if possible. Those machines, also IBM's, run our email, website, file serving, and some small web apps we've developed in house. We can tolerate downtime on those machines for a day or so while I scrounge parts. And given we don't expect to be outgrowing those machines any time quick, I can't justify the cost of new servers. -- Drew "Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood." --Marie Curie