How long till my laptop "dies"? and what does it mean to die?

I m thinking about selling my laptop soon but i don't want it to "die" or something. How long does laptops usually last?? and whne i meant by what does it mean to die, i meant can u do something to make it come back?

 

Totally depends on the unit itself. General rule of thumb, I'd say a laptop would generally last 5 or 6 years or so, some Toshiba notebooks I've seen are still going strong from 2000, 2001 era, but mine only lasted 14 months.

You haven't made it easy to answer that question, it is completely subjective from machine to machine. It's extremely difficult to tell when a notebook is going to die. Unless of course, that notebook has the 8600M/8400M cards...

As for making it come back, I think the answer to that is fairly obvious. Replace the defective part.

 

The ones in your sig are far from dying, you shouldn't worry to much about that though.

 

I have a Toshiba Sattelite 3000 from back in 2002 that still runs. On the otherhand I had a Acer Arpire notebook that experianced issues 11 months after it was purchased. It's mostly about the brand and the particular unit itself. There was actually a research done on the service & reliability of different notebook brands:


ASUS is the clear winner, Dell is in the norms and HP falls to the bottom.

 

Well, I'm also in the malfunction rate. In September 2009, 22 months after I bought it, my hard drive collapsed but I was able to put it back to work and restored some data. Two weeks ago it died completely and had a new drive shipped to me. Also my DVD started failing severely last year.

Mt 2 cents on laptop dying and malfunction rates.

 

Good to hear, because I have a Asus myself

 

I have had 3 Toshiba laptops, all three still function. One is ok, but the hard drive failed and that is easily replaced. That one I bought used was built for Windows 2000. XD My Toshiba X200 I thought was dead, but I baked the GPU and it lives, again.

Edit: Forgot the bad, Sager NP9850, issues out of the box, and 5 months later another. The original is ongoing, they don't seem to know how to fix it. Needless to say, it's my first/last Sager.

 

Yea, I've gone through 9 different notebooks over the years (Toshiba, Acer, Dell, ASUS) and so far I've gone with ASUS 4 times in a row.

 

I also used to post a link to that statistical survey a lot, but there's more to it.
You should look more to what parts are used inside the laptop, and if you have the possibility, wait for a review to see if that particular model has good heat management or not. Heat is one of the biggest causes of deffects, especially if you have a gpu made out of bad materials like the nvidia 7 & 8 series, a good heat management is essential.

Perhaps the biggest issue for laptops is the fact that they are being carried around a lot, which is why they tend to break that fast. Not only does the case usualy start to fall apart, also the hard drive can get damaged seriously due to schocks.

That survey also clearly stated that more expensive models (+1000dollars) tend to last longer, so basicly you get what you pay for. Its also a fact that bussines laptops are of better quality. Eventhough HP scores very bad, some of their bussines models are made by military standards and are very durable.

Let me give an example about one of the so called 'quality brands'.
Asus scores very good in that survey, yet their current g5* and g6* series have very bad cooling (the gpu gets like 90+ celcius). Don't think your gpu will last long with temepratures around that point, unless they found a way to stop the physical consequencies (deterioration) of expanding and shrinking of materials due to heat differences.
Luckely asus improved the cooling system with its new g73jh, but nontheless, they sold some bad models.
The same can be said with sony, even they released an overheating laptop (TZ series).

Now, lets have a look at my acer:
All the hardware parts seem to be of excelent quality (except for my suicidal nvidia 8600mgt). My hard drive is made by Western Digital, my ram is made by hyundai electronics, and so on. My cd-rom&dvd writer/reader is made by LG, which in my eyes was an inferior brand to Sony. Yet when not one dvd player in my house (including my sony playstaiton) could play a movie without stuttering, my LG dvd player seemed to have no problem whatsoever. On the other hand, the heat management of my laptop is bad and the casing is IMO not sturdy enough.

So what does this say about brands? Basicy that every brand has both good and bad quality models. And that every model has both positive and negative aspects. So, how do you know if your future laptop is any good? Simple: be patient and wait for a review. Ofcourse most problems don't occur untill some time has passed, but if the heat management is decent and the critics about the built quality are good, I'd say you can purchase that laptop without too much worries.

edit: Back to topic (to see if your laptop dies): I know only a few signs if your laptop is dying: If you find black holes in your hard drive (information which you can not acces any longer is a good sign of this). But this can be solved easily by replacing your hard drive.
If you start to see rainbow sparks and purple triangle lines it means your gpu is dying.
If everything works normal, I see no reason to worry.

edit 2 (I see I went completely of topic in my initial post rofl):

The way you treat your laptop is also very importent. If you buy a sturdy laptop but will carry it around every day it will show signs of deterioration no matter what (I already mentioned the casing which might become lose, or your hard drive that can be damaged due to shocks). So to answer your qeustion: 'how long till your laptop dies' you should think about what you use your laptop for. My laptop sits on my desk 99% of the time, which is why it still functions (Bought it in oktober 2007), so it has both to do with your laptop, as with yourself.

 

Well, I only owned 2 laptops.
The first one was a DELL Inspiron 1300.
It's backlight went out after about 3 and a half years (along with the HDD ... although this one went out sooner because the laptop accidentally fell to the floor twice 6 months earlier).
The DELL one is still working though seeing as how I replaced it's backlight and HDD (it was a relatively cheap fix), and gave it to my mother.

The current one is an Acer 5930G (about a year and 4 months old).
No problems with this one, apart from the image turning white on rare occasions because the video cable slightly moved due to all the closing/opening of the lid (which is usually fixed by reseating the video cable itself slightly).

It all really depends on the unit itself though.

 

What kind of issue do you have with your Sager? Just curious...

 

That made me laugh, my sony fz-290 came back to life twice. Lets hope it can survive for a while longer.

 

the fact that 18% is an average rate shocks me a bit. 25% after 3 years though is awful. 3 years for such an expensive piece of equipment... 1 in 4 will fail. If it were anything else like a car those would be terrible figures.

 

Actually its even worse than 1 in 4, here's the title of this survery:

1 in 3 Laptops fail over 3 years:
Netbooks fail 20% more than laptops; ASUS & Toshiba the most reliable

But as I said before, its not only the laptop, its also how you take care of it. My Acer which scores bad in the statistics is still running after 2.5 years, and if the gpu will finaly fail, I will just replace it and keep this lappy for another 2-3 years as a dekstop replacement.

 

As Lithus has said before, that study has been debunked countless times. The sample products only included a few models, and should have included entire ranges of laptops. Also, any laptops with the G84M core should really be filtered out of the study for more accurate results, some manufacturers used ATI cards instead of the faulty NVIDIA cards (like my notebook, it could have ended up with an 8600M GT instead).

Aside from the study, I still think that Toshiba is a great brand, and I certainly would buy a notebook from them again. Disregarding my signature, of course.