How long do you expect your laptop to live?

colsten

You have asked the same Q in 4 different posts. I have answered it once.

NICHOLAS_2

If i get 2-3 years out of one before it starts to warp and play up then i am happy.

Then i retire it to my laptop graveyard.

pogofish

Liamstewart70 wrote: »

Hey guys! Just wondering, I bought a product from Apple using Apple finance thinking it would be leaving my bank through direct debt each month, I've received no payments for the past few months and starting to worry that I've misunderstood and should be paying for the product in another way, I've received nothing through the post telling me I should be paying in a certain way and received no info with the product, cheers

Did you buy a redundant lappy or something?

Otherise, you clearly agreed not to hijack threads, so why not play by the rules start your own one for this problem?

And to get this thread back on track, someone brought an early Power Book into our place recently - to see if we could get it going again for him. The battery was utterly gassed. He'd been using it to run a specific bit of software since what, the early 1990s.

The site of all of us rolling around laughing when he asked us to see if we could fix it - the IT guys had refused point-blank, did downhearten him a bit but blow-me, when we removed the battery and fired it up, it worked just fine!

And its not unusual to find Mac IIs lurking in the corners of some of our labs - apparently the standard software for some forms of scientific application/enquiry was released for free but has never been updated/bettered by anything more modern, so they nurse these machines along like ailing grannies!

I once made the mistake of skipping one of these when we were modernising a lab - only to be faced with an appoplectic senior researcher, who went on a skip-diving mission to rescue his treasure and all its peripherals.

Johnmcl7

Jivesinger wrote: »

I have a feeling that older laptops (mine built in 2006 ish) were more solidly built, even for a basic laptop like mine, than the equivalent point in the market today. Today's laptops are cheaper, but may not last as long, I suspect.

There's always been plenty of cheap, poorly built laptops although if anything I'd say more recent laptops are a bit more solid although there is a tendency at the moment to make laptops slimmer and lighter often at the cost of the cooling and repairability plus a general move to limit user's abilities to upgrade and repair PC's.

John

Moneymaker

I use my 2012 MacBook Pro with an external monitor, keyboard and mouse. I expect it to last forever.

ptrichardson

I've never suffered hardware failure of any computer I've personally owned.
Not once, since my first x86 Olivetti PC 20+ years ago

Ben84

I'm really surprised people are saying they're happy with 2 or 3 years. If you look after something ok, it should last longer. Much longer. The main thing is don't buy the fanciest, biggest everything laptop in your price range. You've got to spend a bit on the features and a bit on the quality if you want it to last. I bought this laptop in 2011 and I'm looking forward to a good few more years use.

Anyway, none of my computers have ever completely failed. The occasional CD drive, keyboard or expansion card has failed, but they've all ultimately been discarded because they were obsolete rather than broken. I think after 8 years or more however, I wouldn't spend too much money or time on fixing a slightly broken computer (unless it's vintage and special in some way). You might be able to sell some of the parts however. I sold the memory cards, power supply and screen from my old laptop on eBay.