Computer performance over extended peroids of time

Good morning,

I'm upgrading within the week from my seemingly outdated Inspiron 6400 to a MBP and I was just wondering, does keeping a notebook on for an extended amount of time hurt the performance of the hard drive or processor (or whatever it may hurt)? I've managed to keep my current rig on 24/7 for almost two years save occasional restarts and I've dramatically noticed changes with gaming and multitasking. My computer has extreme slowdowns playing Battlefield 2 when it used to work perfectly and having +20 tabs in Firefox + trying to use iTunes, MSWord and AIM at once is a nightmare! All of this at one time was very possible on my computer but no longer is.

My guess is that leaving my computer on led to the downfall of it's hardware. It's very obvious that it has gotten slower, but I can't just put my finger on the cause yet.

Additionally, on many occasions I would come to my apartment to find that my computer felt as if it was about to ignite and or melt.

 

What about dust buildup inside hindering ventilation?

A well designed laptop can work 24/7 without any problems - also it won't be running under load 24/7.

 

Open your laptop shell.
Clean all those dusts inside.
Close your laptop shell.
Reformat your computer(this is not no brainer but a reformat can fix damn much of errors and viruses u collected over years).
Your laptop will be revive.

 

Download i8kfangui. I think that (I checked, and it kind of makes sense to me that) my Inspiron 6400 experiences slowdowns when the RAM temps reach ~60C.

 

general reply to everyone:

1. thanks for the replies

2. dust always gets in my computer. a while ago I tried cleaning it and was completely unsuccessful unscrewing it so my computer is partially screwed together correctly partially not (i.e. you can move the body's different parts away from each other--- hard to explain)

3. I haven't reformatted in about a year, I'm going to very soon.

4. I've heard that computers live around four or five years--- I've heard that they live as long as you take good care of them. Which one is true? Typically, my computers die quickly. It's not like I'm a computer idiot and install bloatware and all other crap like that, I actually take pretty good care of my computers.

 

Computers live as long as you take care of them - provided parts aren't faulty or the design isn't faulty.

I think dust is a major issue in your case here - dust can be fatal for a computer as the reduced air circulation will cause a build up of heat - andthus slowly increase wear on all components.

 

I guess New York is not too dusty.
Compared to my place which is dusty paradise LOL!
I laptop put on the table for 2 days, I can see a layer of dust on the surface clearly.

 

Unlucky...

I have a 3 year old Inspiron 6400/E1505 that appears to be working as well as when I bought it. I have upgraded the RAM and the HDD's to larger ones a couple times.

 

Leaving a system on 24/7 can decrease its performance over time in several ways, particularly if you don't do regular cleanup such as dumping temporary internet files and the various "temporary" files that get cached here and there, both by the OS as well as by apps. In addition, if you run an app that's been badly coded, or has some minor but not crash-causing corruption, you can get things like memory leaks that continue to take up RAM even though the app they belong to has been terminated, and if you run that app repeatedly, or for a long time, you can build up a whole bunch of memory leaks that will eat up a substantial chunk of your RAM and slow the system waaay down until you shut it down and do a cold restart.

 

Well, HDDs are prone to failure. You'd also be if you were a mechanical part with discs inside of you rotating at 5400RPM or even faster, wouldn't you?

HDDs usually live three to five years with light usage (your case is light usage, I guess - heavy usage would be servers with much work to do). HDDs are able to live much longer, but you shouldn't rely on that anymore after three years.
However, they won't get slower. They either work or they don't.

I think it's either your computer having collected too much dust, or the software part.

That's exactly how it will most likely be. Do this, and you should be fine - at least for now.

 

That's just sad. In Vancouver, it'll take a year for a layer of dust to build up on a table.