Making Those PCs Last

These companies that replace their laptops when the warranties run out sell them to a wholesaler that resells them for cheap. I got this one for $250 and it had been docked it's entire life. The keyboard had never been used! Works great even survived a direct lightning strike (mostly). I forget the name of the place but it's online. A little searching would turn it up.

 

I'm actually a long-time IT person, recently converted to trucking for work.



I'll tell you, at home or in a corporate environment, the biggest killer of systems is dust. Nobody bothers to clean out the dust from the fans, and the systems will overheat and burn themselves down. take the side case off and blow the dust out once a month, or more frequently if you have a dusty home, and they last much longer.

To give you an idea, where I got laid off from, the refresh rate on desktops was 5-6 years. These were budget HP/Compaq systems, and were on 24/7. Systems were kept clean and very rarely did we have an issue.

I have systems running in my home for various duties that are up to 8 years old, and run constantly. I clean them all once a month, and they run just peachy.

 

I don't buy the three yr life thing.. My daughters old Dell that I'm currently using as I killed my with water last night is 8yrs old with origiall parts and never had a issue...

 

Your correct, as dust is a big killer of the pc.. I clean mine out every 2 to 3 months.. To me you only need to replace a pc if for what you use it for has changed and you current system no longer can handle the programs you now have to use.. Most people replace the pc every 1 to 2 yrs just so they can have the latest and greatest.. Heck my system is 3yr old works good.. Put last night I spilled water by accident and hit killed it at least for now. I think it just hit the bottom mounted psu as there is no burn marks any where on the mb itself..

 

I personally like it when companies trade in those one year old laptops. You can get them on the auction sites for a couple hundred dollars.

 

A little shot of canned air in a strategic place aimed at the fan blows everything out for me. No need to disassemble. If you smoke around them, the dust is not only ten times worse, but the tar makes the dust stick to everything.

I've got laptops laying around that are ten years old and still work. I buy only Dell Latitudes. If you look on ebay, parts are extremely cheap and the Latitude is extremely easy to work on. Once you get the hang of it you can break them down and put them back together like an infantryman with an M16.