What is the lifespan of a laptop?

googler

It lasts as long as the replaceable components that went wrong have been replaced, and until the component failure that's uneconomic (or impractical) to replace.

scottishblondie

I buy a new one when I need one \ want one \ can justify it \ technology has moved on enough. I've got a Dell laptop from 2003 and MacBook from 2006, both of which have had minor repairs but are in good working order. The MacBook was a replacement for the Dell (smaller, lighter, faster) and the MacBook has now itself been superseded by a new Macbook Pro (faster), which I mostly bought because I wanted a new one.

However, the minimum lifespan I would find acceptable is 3-4 years. And that is with heavy (though careful ie no dropping!) usage.

esuhl

I'm not too sure what the average lifespan would be. You may find that you have to replace the battery every 3 to 8 years, and the hard drives occasionally fail after maybe 5 to 10 years. Often the lens in the optical drive becomes dusty and has problems reading disks (or the head in the floppy drive gets knocked out of alignment - if you have a seriously old laptop!).

Other than that, if a laptop was looked after, I can't see any reason why it shouldn't last at least 10 or 20 years - by which time you probably would have become fed up with its slow speed and the relatively higher demands of the latest software and would want to replace it, even though it wasn't at the end of its lifespan.

free4440273

my oldest is a Sony Vaio : win me / 1999 -- still working fine .

followed by Fujitsu Siemens xp /2002 -- still working fine .

discount_findr

Had my laptop for around 4 years now, never had any problems and i use it for work as a desktop replacement and do heavy graphics work with it in photoshop, probably use it on average around 20-30 hours per week. Its still going strong, not had to replace anything other then upgrading the memory to 6gb a few months ago.. but having said this I think il probably look to upgrade next year.

Hammyman

Lemon_Labs wrote: »

Can you tell me what makes a laptop "corporate grade"? 5 years ago you'd get a fairly solid laptop any way regardless of price or where it was used. Most new laptops will probably last 3-4 years before an HDD replacement is needed or maybe screen fault etc. But in today's electrical items you get what you pay for, doesn't matter if it's from PC World or eBuyer. If you want a decent laptop try Asus, Lenovo, Sony, Samsung or Apple.

5 years ago you didn't get solid laptops regardless of price or where it was used. OTTOMH, Compaq C300,500,V2000,3000,5000 would have the hinges seize, breaking the hinge covers and putting splits in the lid - the paint would wear off the trackpad and the palmrests in a very short amount of time. Acer 5000 series - keyboards, left mouse button, screen hinges, charge sockets and the cpu heatsink got blocked in under a year.

The corporate grade ones are built a lot better. You will find that, in the example of Dell that whilst their £500 retail model comes with 4GB of RAM, a 320GB Hard Drive, glossy screen and glossy case, the corporate one will have 2GB of RAM, a 160GB HDD, matte screen and quite dull boring case. Also the retail ones would have 12 months warranty, the corporate ones, 3 years.

Take the laptops apart and you start to see large differences. On the corporate Thinkpads, they have drain holes through the keyboard so spill a drink on it and it just drains away. Power sockets aren't soldered to the mainboard on the whole, they're on a flylead. Even picking them up they'll feel a whole lot heavier and more solid due to a solid metal chassis and a thick metal plate behind the screen. Take a T series Thinkpad apart and it looks like its been designed to survive being run over by a tank - the plate behind the screen is a couple of mm thick. The plastics will be stronger and more durable, the screen hinges will be beefier. The CPU fan will be easier to get at to clean and be able to be done without removing the heatsink assembly - most Toshiba Tecras even had a cover just for the cooling fan. The batteries are made of higher grade cells and last a lot longer - whilst a typical consumer grade laptop will see you buying a new battery after 12-18 months, a corporate grade one will last double that before you start to get a noticeable a drop off in capacity even if you leave it plugged in most of the time.

boxst

A friend of mine needed an 'emergency' laptop. I have a collecting pile from various jobs and I dug out an IBM Thinkpad T21 (from 2000ish) and apart from a completely flat battery (£20 from eBay) it worked perfectly. It has XP, I loaded Office 2007 and it surprisingly has pretty good speed.

Steve

esuhl

I remember the horrors of using a 286 monochrome laptop with a 5.5" floppy drive when I was at uni. (Most people had Pentiums by then, but my mate was given this laptop as a "curiosity").

Well... I say it was a laptop... I'm not sure that the concept existed back then! It must've weighed about 20kg and couldn't be used for more than 5 minutes before your legs went numb... The integrated pop-out handle was large enough for you to grab it with both hands... for good reason! Oh, and it needed mains power - there was no battery! (I dread to think how heavy it would have been otherwise!)

It was so slow, the only practical use was running MS-DOS's EDIT.EXE as a rudimentary word processor. But that was better than having to go to the computer lab at 4am to type a draft of an essay.

Anyway, that was 17 years ago, and the laptop was probably 10 years old then. I wouldn't be totally surprised if it was still perfectly functional...

closed

corporate grade is probably built in the same factory to the same standards, with many of the same components as consumer grade.

Corporate is usually slightly older technology rather than state of the art, maybe a litte more rugged. The premium cost is more down to business than value.

Providing there isn't a design/component fault or mistreatment all laptops should last at least 10 years if not 20 whether they cost £300 or £1500. Some brands last longer than others.

spud17

Got one of these for a doorstop, fan stopped, cooked processor about 4 years back. £4000 new and mine had Win98.

ps it was non working and I was given it for retrieving the data about 5 years ago. I paid £17 for new internal powersupply, and it carried on until the fan gave up and the inevitable happened.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/laptops/1110/compaq-armada-7770dmt