[jgl]

That 3 year figure is probably driven more by accounting than by technology considerations. If I recall correctly, assets such as computers are usually depreciated over 3 years.

[MovingIn07]

Yep - no doubt you are right. Trouble is, apart from the REALLY old ones I mentioned earlier in the thread it is all the experience I have to share since the company takes them away so I do not use them "into the ground". My husband had one for about 5 years (a DELL) and he was getting really fed up with it when I purchased him a mac for xmas. That was working fine (and he is a heavy user and also frequent traveller so it got knocked about abit), but the speed was noticably down compared to what others were able to get by purchasing new. Funny how speed is all relative! You do not worry about it until you realise that YOUR laptop is much slower than everyone else's!

[vmlinuz]

Over the past few years, I've 'upgraded' my laptop every 18 months or so - but more by accident than plan. I came to HK with an approximately 18-month-old Powerbook, and was given a new Thinkpad by work, which I used as a personal machine as well. I left that job and the laptop, bought myself a Dell in summer 2006. Got an Eee late last year, not really meant to replace the Dell, but it has - I haven't turned the Dell on in weeks. I suspect I'll get a newer netbook-class machine later this year, as the power/price/availability stuff settles down. When a new machine costs less than $4000, it's worth getting one every year, I think.

For desktop machines, I tend to do a CPU/motherboard/RAM upgrade every 18-24 months too, just because that's the timescale which gets you a very significant increase in power/efficiency/features for a similar price...

[kombuchakid]

I got my Dell Insipron in mid 2001, and aside from replacing the screen[my own fault] and replacing the hinges, nothing dramatic has happened.
Now of course a lot of programs don't operate on Win Me and the 10gb hard disk can be constricting, so I have been having a look at the eeePc 10 inch.
I want to go for the Linux system with a 80gb SSD, but it seems such a beast has not arrived here yet
But I'm prepared to wait.

[jayinhongkong]

In early 2005, I received a brand new, $2000 US Dell Inspiron E1705 with Windows Media Center 2005. At the time, it was a top of the line machine. Core Duo 2.0, Nvidia GEForce Go 7800, etc. It got extremely hot: so hot that I could never place it on my lap without burning myself.

Well, it lasted me until the end of 2007 before the poor design caused the motherboard to burn out. Some people had theirs burn out within weeks of purchase, so I guess I got lucky, but I was hoping it would last significantly longer than a year and 10 months! The Dell 9400s and E1705s were plagued with problems. I'll never buy a Dell laptop again.

[johnkeh]

@OP: My apologies if you feel insulted re: killing the laptop when dropped, I thought it sounded sarcastic enough.

If you are asking about how long the parts will last until it starts malfunctioning, the parts inside a laptop usually has an expected value of how many times it can do a certain task (Battery - how many power cycles, hard disks - how many writes, etc) and it eventually lose their integrity over time. For someone like me who plays games every night and never turns the PC off, I'd guess that my laptop will only last half as long as the average laptop.

As for the laptop usefulness, you have a point with the car analogy; you can make improvements and repairs on the laptop as you please, but the main difference is, cars merely take you from point A to point B, and this has been the case for a long time. With computers, the means by which you do certain tasks also evolve, and most of the time, it ostracizes the older technology and the latter is forced to upgrade. Take this for example: I can remember some eons ago where I watched my auntie use Wordstar (pre-windows word processor). Microsoft word might still provide the same function with simple documents, but with newer software, comes the functionality to use new and helpful tools, like having access to bold, underline, italicize, etc. You can stick with Wordstar if you just need blocks of text, but if you want to send your file, or want to open other people's MS Word docs, it would be impossible. You cannot upgrade to MS Office because your laptop is only powerful enough to run Wordstar, and hence you need to upgrade.

It really depends on your tolerance on things and the requirements in the future. An average person uses the PC to IM, surf, check e-mail and type documents, with that said, the oldest laptop I can think of that will run today on those functions would be some 1998 PCs that can at least run Win95, Word 95, and IE, but as with a car with the low fuel economy and faulty a/c, your experience will be pretty limited and sometimes frustrating.

[Vinrej]

Originally Posted by zenlogo

As far as "getting slower and slower", a system restore won't fix it. If you want to get 'like new' speeds - reformat it and reload just the programs you really need.

Remember: reformatting clears everything, so make sure you have the operating system on disk and save all your data to disks before.

Exactamundo! Thats why I reformat every year or sometimes even twice a year if I feel the urge.

[Hamton]

Originally Posted by jimbo

2-3 years is about right for laptops.

That really depends what you're doing with the laptop... Maybe 2-3 years before mechanical HDD failure sets in if you're carrying it to work every day, otherwise if it's mostly on the desk... not at all.

I've just passed down a 5.5 year Sony Vaio Z1 to my wife. That was top of the range at the time, and it's still going near perfectly, aside from a slightly finicky DVD drive that took a few bumps on travels. It's still pretty fast too and the memory's been upgraded since, so it can at least handle stuff like Adobe Creative Suite without too much pain (originally when I bought it, I used it for some fairly intensive 3D modeling/animation and video editing).

I've reformatted it twice, but mostly out of paranoia rather than for real benefits - as I didn't go installing too much crap on it, it really didn't start slowing down much.

On the other hand, give my parents a new laptop and within a couple of months it will slow to a crawl... Mind you I've since sorted them out with a basic guide to 'not installing absolutely everything'.

I had an old Thinkpad too, that lasted about... 6 years I think, before I stuck it on eBay, at which point it was still working fine, though I'd resorted to sticking Linux on it to make it feel faster.

Though I'm usually working on a fairly new computer, either a new laptop or a powerful desktop... if I was forced to do all my work on a 5 year old laptop I'd probably get pretty pissed off. But they serve their purposes, as... well, web browsers at the very least.

[johnkeh]

There's actually no need to reformat, but it's the easy and sure way to fix things

Just make sure that you run minimal programs and get rid/uninstall all the unnecessary stuff (pre-installed "bonus" software), and disable things you don't really use (bluetooth perhaps, or print spooler if you don't have a printer).

I inherited my sister's Dell Inspiron 5150 back in college, and when I got it, it was not running; it was crawling and limping. Yes I did reformat, but that was to switch to XP Pro from XP Home,, but once i got it properly set-up and maintained, It ran like brand new. I got a hold of her new laptop, and it's pretty much safe to say that it runs slower than what I got her old laptop to run at. The cause: she has too many programs running in the background. MSN, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, a few instances of Firefox, anti-virus (yes I don't use it), bluetooth software, some other useless fancy programs.

And by the way, have you guys tried buying a can of compressed air to clean out your laptop fans? it helps the laptop run more efficiently (unless your laptop is brand spanking new or you work inside a clean room or something)