Anyone out there know what a reasonable lifespan for a very heavily used laptop would be?
Mine is 3 years old and starting to overheat again on occasion, and I’m trying to figure out if this is the beginning of the end or if taking it to the shop would make sense. (Even if it is a huge pain in the ass and I’m not sure I want to shell out a lot of money on repairs if it’s just going to be a band-aid fix.)
June 27th, 2008 - 11:07 pm
3 years in laptop years, isn’t really very old… I’d suggest you back-up your pictures, music, other pron goodies to dvd or cd, or better yet, go out and purchase an external drive and move all your stuff to there, then maybe even go so far as to purchase some larger memory for it, and perhaps a new and larger harddrive… you, yes YOU can install that hardware… then do a complete format and re-install of the OS… do that, and it’ll serve your needs for a couple of more years…
if your ass was here, your’s truly would do it for you !
June 28th, 2008 - 4:33 pm
Depends on the laptop. That’s one extended-warranty-length, so that’s one metric. On the other hand I have Thinkpads here that are five and eight years old, and the only failure has been of the hinges on the eight-year-old one. Both are very slow by modern standards, though. And I recently gave away some late-80s laptops that still worked great, but as always I’d say they don’t make ‘em like they used to (although it’s really more that they’ve become more complex over time).
What’s your laptop?
June 28th, 2008 - 4:40 pm
It’s a Toshiba P35-S605 I got in 2005. It’s got a 100GB hard drive that is about half full, P4 CPU and 448MB of RAM (which is probably the problem, cause it seems everything out there is a memory hog.)
June 28th, 2008 - 9:04 pm
Two problems, really: P4 (horribly inefficient and hot-running, as you’ve found) and the RAM. I wouldn’t put a cent into a P4 laptop. The P4 was a bad move by Intel in the first place, basically shoehorning a desktop CPU into a laptop.
That doesn’t mean you have to buy a new laptop, either, though (unless you want to!). I’d say the sweet spot is a one- or two-year-old refurbished off-lease Pentium M-based laptop. Mine is a Dell Latitude D410, which I love because it’s tiny (12″ non-widescreen, no onboard optical drive) and light (under 4 lbs), and is plenty for me. I think it was $700 Canadian a year ago, and that’s with the “pay extra for something small” bit figured in.
(I can’t picture myself ever not buying a refurb off-lease business laptop, really. The leasing company’s already weeded out the manufacturing defects, the refurbs clean them up really well, and they’re usually reliable machines with easy-to-find drivers. Especially Thinkpads.)
June 28th, 2008 - 9:17 pm
Thanks for the info - sad thing is that the P4 was “the bestest, most awesome thing EVAR” when I got this. Gotta love how quick things either become obsolete or the industry figures out a little too late that “oh, this wasn’t the best idea we’ve ever had.”
I’ll have to start poking around at refurbs and see what comes up.
June 28th, 2008 - 9:24 pm
Yeah, it’s the second thing. The P4 was basically the last laptop before the industry went “hey, there are some very specific requirements for mobile computing, like battery life and temperature, that might be more important than clock speed”, which got us the Pentium M. But they sold the P4 and the Pentium M side by side for a long time, the former as the “high-performance” laptops and the latter as the “mobile” models. But it turns out that most people don’t need “high-performance” in their laptop.
Also on the subject of refurbs: Candice just bought a refurb MacBook from Apple, saved a couple hundred bucks. It’s not the same deal as the off-lease, because it’s a current model, returned and sold refurbished by the manufacturer, where the off-lease refurbs are 1-3 years old and sold by the leasing companies either directly or to local computer stores, but it was a good deal nonetheless if you’re thinking of heading that way!