(FORTUNE Magazine) – Is it time to upgrade? Do you have a choice? If you don't have the latest and (always) greatest software and hardware on your business computers, your vendors and employees can make you feel that you're just one step away from quill pens and parchment. The truth is that most small businesses, and consumers for that matter, get cajoled into upgrades that give them more headaches than benefits. But even big-company IT departments with full-blown evaluation staffs find it hard to resist the allure of the state of the art.

For example: Microsoft's latest version of Windows, cutely named Windows Me (or Millennium). Although aimed at the consumer market, it will undoubtedly be pitched to small businesses that don't have professional IT staffs. But because PC vendors may use it as an upgrade to Windows 98, you may feel you have to as well (despite technology press reviews, which have been lukewarm). How about CPU speed? The publicity machine for more megahertz can be reminiscent of car ads of the 1960s, in the ancient days of cheap gas. They commercials promised more and more horsepower and never mentioned the slide toward single-digit miles per gallon. One reason the computer industry is seeing a slowdown is that CPU power is more than adequate for most office tasks. But you can be made to feel inadequate if you don't have a one-gigahertz chip in your PC.

Your own employees can be another source of pressure for upgrading. That shouldn't be a surprise. Vendors figured out long ago that they could channel their message through the employees of their customers. So many tech ads are deliberately aimed at employees, promising new capabilities in their everyday tasks.

Workers pressure their bosses, who then agree to order upgrades. This strategy wouldn't be so troublesome if the results were predictable. The problem is that software (and some complex hardware) is more art than science. You may get a handful of new features, but you also end up with a new set of bugs in functions that used to work perfectly well in the older version.

One way to deal with the upgrade impulse is to add some rationality to the process. When employees ask for newer versions of a product, ask them to figure out the total cost--which is more than the price of the product itself. You have to add the cost (and time) of installation, debugging, and training of employees to use the new version and new features. And ask them to show you how those newfangled features relate directly to their jobs.

You can also ask them to browse the tech bulletin boards and the Usenet discussion groups on the Internet for the products they're interested in. The Usenet groups, older than the Web but easily tapped with software like Microsoft's Outlook Express, are a rich source of blunt comment and analysis of the latest great products. Seeing the comments about installation problems, upgrade issues, and reported incompatibilities with other products can cool the ardor of any technology fanatic.

I wouldn't want to leave you with the impression that I'm a Luddite: There's nothing I love more than a new gadget, a new router, or a new version of Microsoft Word. But when I went from buying software for myself to buying it for a company or department, I remembered the comment of a wise IT executive after I had raved about the latest version of a product. "It sounds great for you," he said, "but tell me if it's worth buying 50, 500, or 5,000 copies."

JOEL DREYFUSS has been writing about technology for 15 years. He can be reached by e-mail at jdreyfuss@attglobal.net.