Old Laptops Are More Trouble Than They're Worth

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I have an ancient Gateway 1.5Ghz PentiumM with 256MB of RAM I was considering throwing out since even XP with SP3 drags it down to being unusable. Anyway I installed Slitaz Linux on it and loved it. Now the server is down and I switched to Crunchbang, not quite as snappy but its pretty sweet to have a nice laptop again :)
Its too bad that in the corporate world hardware cannot be recycled this way, I can only imagine the $$$ saved.
 
Oh yeah, gotta buy a new one.

My Dell Inspiron at 5+ years still works great and still gets nearly 3 hours on the original battery. But I needed to run more apps on it now and they need more power, so I had to buy a new workstation-class laptop to supplement it. I still use the old one when it can do the job.

For business use it's easy to see how an old machine could cost a company money for various reasons. I've decided to replace my desktop workstations every 2 years, but our CAD and engineering apps need all the power we can get and more.
 
... Hmmmmmm... Hmmmm... The study seems suspicious. Was the $960 average form the 1 stolen notebook out of 1000 with "value data" costing the company $960,000... If only that had the new lo-jacked, super-duper encrypted notebook.

That being said, one good reason for businesses to just purchase a new notebook after the 3 year warranty period is that about half of the cost of the notebook will have been amortized and the remaining half can mostly be recovered by selling the notebook (i.e. net cost is close to zero). And, obviously, out of warranty repair cost will be close to nil.
 
this doesn't sound like an analysis valid for a geeky home user, yet it will be very valid for the average user and even more so for companies that have to spend ridiculous amounts of money for warrantied tech support

I still keep my old Toshiba Satellite I bought about 4 or 5 years ago... runs like a champ, I've added 1 gig of RAM and I'm about to replace the DVD unit... then again, I'm not representative of your average laptop owner... let alone of an employee who has a company laptop
 
Probably that 2-3 year life cycle is geared towards the consumer grade laptops, especially the newer ones. I found this to be very common on Dell laptops. At least Dell laptops are so common you can easily locate cheap, used, or even new parts for them.

Many people tend to buy a laptop and sit it on a desk or table most of the time which isn't as hard on them. Actually using a laptop on your lap can wear things out pretty quickly from fraying inside the wiring of the AC adapter to loose/squeaky hinges.

My last laptop was a Dell Inspiron 6400. The battery died within the first year due to heat issues and easily clogged vent. After the first year you had to tighten the hinges once in awhile. Eventually ended up having to pick up new hinges with an LCD assembly after one of the hinges decoupled from the LCD panel. Went through a keyboard almost every year, when the keys weren't popping off I was wearing indentations into the keys. (and no I don't pound on the keyboard)

Then there is the ever famous Dell AC adapters. If my laptop wasn't rejecting it as a genuine adapter, it was beeping, buzzing etc and needing replacement.

Then there are those painted on finishes. Nothing like having a laptop for 2-3+ years and it looking like utter crap because the silver finish is wearing off on the touchpad and all the plastics surrounding it.
 
What I think you guys are all forgetting is that the "end user" in this case is not a fairly tech savvy user. The computerworld article includes quotes about cost to an organization in terms of lost end-user productivity. So not only do people not properly maintain their laptop, but that issue is compounded as time the company is paying for is not used for work and instead spent waiting around for things to load.

The bloat gets especially bad if the needs of the employee require that they have Administrator access....
 
$960 over two years? That's a joke, even for something that cost $3000 to begin with. Whoever did this 'research' or 'study' is doing better drugs than I am.

www.dfsdirectsales.com

No reason to go anywhere else for notebooks.

Good prices, usually gold warranty included. OS, that works. Cheap RAM upgrades if needed.

I piss on $960.
 
For those who haven't had to spend anything to 'maintain' their laptops, you have to remember you're most likely a technically-minded user who actually knows how to take care of your stuff. I went to a college where every student was given a tablet computer. It amazed me how much some students would abuse their computer simply because they didn't know any better. Stuff like dropping the computer on a tabletop, picking it up by the screen, etc. Add to that the fact that some people are less likely to take care of an organization-provided computer than if the computer belonged to them personally. This is why Average Joe actually has maintenance costs for his laptop.
 
The typical human is a moron. Just enough brain cells to reproduce. 🙁

Common sense says "don't pick it up by the screen" or treat it like its a rubber dog toy.
 
feh!! You can upgrade a laptop --- if you REALLY wanted to ... I took a laptop with WXGA (1400x900) screen and slapped a WUXGA (1920x1080) screen ... All it took was some research and the willingness to do it .. understanding that not all people have that... I can now watch things in glorious HD -- on a rather old and still useful laptop ...
 
wrong wrong wrong

p3 laptops are still super usefull
replacing the hard drive 40 bucks
ram can be iffy but to say they are no good ...foolish
fan replacement is the biggest issue on these device do to
poor cooling and and they are so hard to find
 
I can attest to this article, and I agree with it. My 2 year old Compaq was having battery problems (1.6Ghz Pentium Dual, 1GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive). Then one day, turned it on, no POST beeps. Tried everything I could to fix it. I went online to find a replacement motherboard. Cheapest I found was $300 through a reliable vendor (Sorry, I don't trust Ebay for computer parts). So was looking around $400 roughly to repair it. For $600, got a new Dell with a 2.0Ghz Core2Duo, 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive.
 
furthermore... this is why crappy laptops are sold on e-bay and craigslist for 400 dollars or more... sad really. people just don't understand how much faster new parts are...
 
I'd say this is accurate. I maintain friend's and family's computers. The worst thing is a 3-5 year old laptop someone is trying to hang on to. Most common problem is heat issues from clogged fans and extreme sluggishness from never having a fresh OS reload. This needs to be done every year to maintain zippyness on all Windows systems including Vista.
 
Why can't they make a fully upgradeable laptop? standardize the case and upgrade it like you would in a desktop, buy a new board, CPU etc...
 
i've still got my dell inspiron 6600, circa 2004, and it runs beautifully. even installed win7 on it, everything still works great. no dead pixels, no HD hiccups, battery even still last damn near 2 hours :) if you take care of things, then they'll last a lot longer than average.
 
I bought an admittedly over-priced Gateway E265-M in summer '07 (forigve me, I didn't understand computers then.) Since then, the only extra cost has been a hard drive that I chose to upgrade to, and I re-used the original as a portable drive. With a Core2Duo @2GHz and 2GBmem, I'm pretty sure it'll still be a decent laptop in two or three more years (4-5 year lifespan.) So I don't see the basis of their argument. Also, a friend is having me build a multi-flavored linux laptop out of an already six year old laptop. Ubuntu flavors leave my desktop to shame due to the laptop having all the compatibilities imaginable.
 
[citation][nom]w4ffles[/nom]Only if you hire Geek Squad to fix it for you.[/citation]
Ha.
My last lappy lasted for 4-5 years. Sure, a 1.6GHz celeron and 512MB RAM may sound lacking, butin all reality, it was just like a 15" netbook. The only issue was that it could barely hold a charge after all that time, which was fine, it was always used as a desktop anyways.
 
actually, my travelmate just needs a new battery & that's only AUD$90 on ebay. BTW, my laptops also 3 years old. where's the rest of that US$960 going?
 
Funny - the 8 yo. laptop I keep around is still in use (almost daily). It's an IBM Thinkpad a21m (one of the early 'desktop replacement' models, if you will). Over time, I:
- added/replaced SDRAM
- replaced the Win2000 OS with Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS
- replaced the 2.5"x12mm 20 Gb HDD.

Cost:
- $40 for a new (2007), larger (80 Gb), MUCH faster (2 platters, 4800 rpm, 2 Mb of cache) HDD. Replacement: easy (a2x Thinkpads use a drawer design for HDD bays, physically replacing the disk can be done in less than 5 minutes)
- 30 minutes to install said Linux OS (updates happen seamlessly)
- $100 (over time) to replace the original 128 Mb with 512 Mb of RAM.
- $30 for a Wi-fi PCMCIA card.

And since a P3-750 can kick a Celeron 900 around (L2 cache), this makes the machine pretty much as powerful as an early netbook - with a larger screen and a much more comfortable keyboard.

The original battery still works.

Now, this is an extreme case: apart from IBM, I don't know of any manufacturer that made machines that didn't spontaneously start decaying after 1-3 years. And it's not without its faults: the integrated Ati Rage Mobility M1 chip can barely run Google Earth in Linux (well, it simply refused to run it in Windows, so...) and USB 1.1 is not fast enough for external HDDs.

But a cost (everything included, I sometimes use a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card on it, but not exclusively) of $300 for a laptop that initially cost me $2500 and lasted 8 years, well, I consider it a good deal.

For a sh*tty 2005 HP, Acer or Toshiba though, the article is spot on.
 
@ Mitch074

I have on eof those shitty toshiba 2004 laptops. and to be honest I think it smacks yours around like a little cheeky biatch.

I have replaced the hard disk with a 320 GB PMR 5400 rpm Scorpio. Much quicker. It has a 1.73 Dothan core OC'ed to 2.5 Ghz. 1.5 gigs ram, built in wifi. USB 2.0. etc etc etc.

Admittedly I was forced to upgrade the HD due to failure of the previous one. Still the cost was reasonable and the extra capacity and speed are awesome. Google earth is not even close to being an issue.

Anyway, I am not here to shoot you down, just don't dis my marvelous build. The laptop itself costs less than that $960 figure when new and the upgrades were not that expensive. It IS POSSIBLE to upgrade the internals of laptops. CPU's RAM, HD's, wifi cards etc. Some of the older ones also have upgradable GPU's, although they are very hard to come by.

Anyway, businesses that have techtards for employee's may well just buy new, but technorati rulers like us laugh and mock there economic dis-ingenuity.
 
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