With varying budgets, some of the 37 academic departments within the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences used to try to make faculty and staff computers last for up to a decade, says Dan Wood, associate director for user services in the college’s Applied Technologies for Learning in the Arts & Sciences program. But keeping the older equipment in use, Wood says, often equated to increased support time and costs. Then, seven years ago, the university launched the ATLAS Care program, which refreshes departmental devices using a bulk pricing model the university established with vendors such as Lenovo and Dell. Since then, help requests concerning items near the end of their lifecycles have drastically declined.
