How long does a laptop last?

[#1]

Aside from the limited life of those batteries - which I guess we all know about, how  long does a laptop last for... and I'm thinking here mainly about all the (and I'm obliged to be polite here) 'dross' they seem to accumulate over the months and years which despite any disc cleanups I can never seem to get rid of.

Tech advances play a part of course but on average it seems to be about four years before all those unwanted piggyback programs you never wanted or asked for slows everything down. 

[#2]

You can always reset a laptop to its factory-supplied state to get rid of accumulated dross.  With Windows 10 you can easily do a clean install to also get rid of manufacturer-supplied dross and you can do this without having to worry about Windows activation issues.

However hard drives of the old electro-mechanical type can slow down as they age giving a permanent loss of performance.  Laptop cooling systems tend to clog-up with dust making them less efficient.  This causes the processor to run hotter, making it less efficient and slower. 

[#3]

My Sony Vaio is still going pretty strong after almost 7 years. It has had a couple of good clean outs and one factory reset and all the dross was taken off at purchase and the reset. SWMBO now has it. It does seem a bit slower but that could be because she also has a a reasonably new MSI laptop she is comparing it to.

[#4]

Run it till it is "too old" then put Linux on it. It will be like a new laptop again.

[#5]

wait, you mean you aren't supposed to put linux straight on it out of the box and run windows as a VM when needed?

[#6]

Personally I only run M$ as a dual boot to game on. Otherwise it isn't installed on my pc's.
Putting Linux on a new lappy well never had one to do that with. My "new" one was a reconed Leveno think pad. Blew M$ away and put Mint straight on.

[#7]

Ive got a dell laptop 600 pounds, which was bought in 2010.

And Ive also got a Compaq 300 pounds which was bought in 2009

I only have had the battery die on me now on Compaq and the dell is still running strong

I always in about 6 months take keyboard off and clean the fan out with hoover.

We don't watch any television so the computers are on from 9am to about 4/5am daily.

So I would suggest cleaning out the fan and vents regularly.

[#8]

I have a Tatung tablet PC (1.5GHz Pentium M) bought in 2005 which currently runs Win7 quite happily

[#9]

I've got a Toshiba laptop from 2006 with 512MB of RAM.

Still runs on the original batteries, although I've had to replace the power brick thing.

It once ran Windows XP for quite a few years, rather slowly.

It now runs Linux Mint Cinnamon (which has a big GUI desktop) - so this is quite a big ask - and it's quite slow.

It's sole use is to run Skype, occasionally.

[#10]

Some great comments guys, thanks.

[#11]

Do laptops still have CMOS batteries? My first one, bought in 1997, eventually became more or less useless because the CMOS battery died and it couldn't remember the time when it booted up. It took about ten years, though, and by then it was laughably obsolete anyway. (No internet except via a PC-card dialup modem, no USB, Win95 ...) My mother had a screen go slightly funny after six or seven years on a 2005 Compaq, but it still runs. I usually reckon 4-5 years of useful life, but I tend to replace them when they get tiresome rather than waiting for something to break.

[#12]

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@ReedRichards wrote:
However hard drives of the old electro-mechanical type can slow down as they age giving a permanent loss of performance. 

Eh?

Do they spin slower?

[#13]

Had my old Toshiba Tecra for several years before I finally flogged it.

In its life I replaced the battery once. A couple of quid for a new one on ebay.

And the graphics card daughter board. From a smashed up Tosh on ebay again for just a couple of quid.

Now I just have a couple of desktop PC's.

[#14]

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Browni wrote:

Eh?

Do they spin slower?

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Sometimes hard drives get to a certain point/file and stick there for a very long time - which is pretty obvious when you are attuned to the possibility.  Also I routinely wipe old defunct hard drives by overwriting them with random data.  The time that takes per GB can be very variable from one hard drive to another and from one section of the hard drive to another.  I'm pretty sure that hard drives that take a long time to 'clean' came from computers that showed past poor performance. 

[#15]

Sounds like bad sectors you are describing which can happen any time.