Lfe expectancy

How much a laptop could "live" on a 24/7 usage?

 

The answer to your question depends on many factors.

FWIW, I've got at least two ThinkPads which have been on 24/7/365 for about five years now...

 

I figure one of the more important factors would be the environment you stick them in. Keep the laptop in a cool, well-ventilated room, don't block and of the laptop's vents and don't move it around too much, and it should last for quite awhile.

 

Just like these two post says there so many factors some you can see and some you can't so unless you can give us more environmental issues and where it will operate anything can be said. Also you can buy it the first day and turn on the next day it and it goes dead the next day. So it doesn't have to be environmental issues as well. As anything a electrical device will fail the day you buy it or never fail except from hardware aging that is the nature of any electronic device.

 

Some manufacturers (begins with an H and ends with a P) use subpar quality stuff, I've had to replace a billion HP fan/heatsink combinations working at my old job. In general, it should last quite a while barring random hardware failure.

 

Were these Pavilion-class or Elitebook-class laptops?

 

Pavilion garbage. I've bought plenty of Dell consumer grade (mostly older notebooks) and never really had an issue.

 

I don't believe I've ever owned a consumer-grade Dell but was not too happy to work on several that my friends had owned over the past decade.

The only HPs I've ever owned or worked on were business-grade and they were fine machines in most respects.

Pavillion...thanks but no thanks.

 

Buy a good brand, HP and Acer might be cheap and even offer even dGPUs but in the long run it'll cost you more. ASUS are the best but Toshiba and Lenovo followed by Dell and Sony come close.

 

Actually, you'd be wrong on that. If you're looking for long-term reliability, you're looking for a business-class laptop (which Dell, HP, Lenovo, Fujitsu, and Panasonic make), with consumer-class laptops (Acer, Asus, Sony, Toshiba, HP consumer-class, Dell consumer-class, Lenovo consumer-class, etc etc....) being quite a bit behind in this regard. You can't make a blanket statement about the quality of an OEM's computers when that OEM makes both consumer-class and business-class. And even with consumer-class-only OEMs, some models of computer are more/less reliable than other models in that OEM's lineup.

 

No XX brand has any significant percentage of hardware failure any another. But each company's customer service is a completely different story.

But the above post is true, business class is considered far superior in terms of durability, and general reliability. And if that wasn't enough, business warranties are far more comprehensive from what you order from Newegg for a normal laptop. There's a reason why all Fortune 500 companies and the government buy business grade notebooks (yes I work for the federal government, I assure you its almost all Dell Latitudes/Lenovo ThinkPads/HP Elitebooks), I'll let you mull over that a bit.

 

Same situation in public schools (yeah, that's government too, I suppose) and private companies even smaller than Fortune 500. I'm going to be working for a company near the top of that 500 list this summer as an intern, and all I saw were Dell/HP business-class computers (about 50/50 desktop/laptop).

The only place where I saw anything else was my high school, which had mostly HP Compaq business laptops but also a cart or two of white MacBooks, and an iMac computer lab. But that's only because the school district received *massive* kickbacks from Apple. They were being serviced longer than they were actually being used by students, though...

 

FWIW, large organizations buy business class devices because that's the only thing the manufacturers sell in large quantities. If you place a single order for hundreds/thousands of machines, any company will offer their business or office lines.

Pavilions and the like are made for retail...

I had a Toshiba P300 and a Fujitsu Amilo A1650 that I sold to relatives , both low end machines, which are still working even after years of near abuse...

 

Eh? You could go and call HP to buy 1,000 Pavilions if you wished. It's just a really, really bad idea to do so and no sane company would want to buy consumer-class laptops en masse.

 

Yeah I shouldve definitely made the distinction, an uncle of mine gives away his company laptops and they are absolute tanks. I really didnt know that OEM and Business were the same though.

 

Not all Original Equipment Manufacturers make Business machines... Some make consumer stuff, others make both.

 

This^

My old consumer Dell 1501 is running 24/7 as my file server, and while 7 years old it still runs like new, only the battery is drained and one of the rubber feet was broken off by accident.

Just get a laptop with good cooling, generally the louder the fan, the better the cooling.

 

That really depends on the design of the particular machine.

ToughBooks were passively cooled until the Core i era, and they withstood hard work and abuse all over the world fanless...

 

exception being nvidia's chipsets somewhere between 2007 to 2009 or so Regardless of brand, they blew up.

 

Pretty much 3-5 years estamite imo.

 

Wonder if my Geforce 9650GT is in that...probably... Seems like a loooot of problems in general with that what, 90 and 65nm process?

Anyway I get the impression that most notebooks have lousy cooling, and aren't really designed to be used. Like they include these potentially high end components, but use 'em? They don't handle it that well.

I've got some Alienware (i.e. high end Dell) notebooks with excellent cooling, and an Asus G74 that does as well. Several of those have had the CPU and GPUs pushed to 100% for over a year with zero issues.

Meanwhile my normal Asus consumer notebook started dying less than 2 years in of just more normal use. (Heavy use, but not 24/7 at 100!)

 

Cooling and physical design have their part in life expectancy too. One of the big reasons for nvidia chipser solder failure was quick changes from hot to cold to hot etc. Big heatsinks provide lower temps and also slow down how fast system heats and cools.

In nvidia's case it was the whole lead-free manufacturing process, so all their chips of that time were affected. Graphics chips and system chipsets both could equally fail, didn't matter if it was built in a laptop or desktop form. Some of those chips were still quite recently sold in budget computers (a desktop made in 2011 or so had NF430 chipset).