Did any laptop die on you? If so, how long have you used it?

Actually I am only on my second laptop. My first one was a Dell Vostro 1500, a heavy business model with dedicated video card. The specifications were good for its time. Core 2 Due E7500 @ 2.2GHZ with 4MB L2 cache, 2GB RAM. I bought it for my college and used it for 7 years before it finally went black screen on me. Over the years, I used it for notes taking, homework, random research, and LAN parties! I also did some upgrade at some point by pumping the RAM to 4GB (the max it could take), and replaced the old HDD to a SSD. It made the laptop faster than before.

However, everything has come to an end. Eventually it died on me just last year which made it a very old laptop indeed. When it "died", it actually still could be turned on. I could hear the boot up sound, but the screen does not light up. So I guess it is either the screen or the graphics card had died. It would be a lot of trouble to get replacement parts for this old model and so I gave up and bought a new laptop instead. A Surface Pro 4 as soon as it was released, since it was just around the same time.

So if anyone had a laptop ever died on you, how old was it before it died?

 

My first HP laptop was also 7 years old when it died after two years of being overheated. I used a portable fan for it the last two years of its life, but then things just died out slowly. I believe it has lived out its glory days and my money was well spent. I bought another HP laptop, and this one must be a lemon, as it died only after two years old because of the overheating problem, even though I used the fan right off the start.

So I am on my third laptop, and it is a MacBook Air. Hopefully, this one will last me for years!

 

My old one died recently which was second-hand when I bought it and was already quite old and outdated but it did the job for what I needed it for. That is, until it popped about two months ago. So, I ended up buying a brand new laptop for the first time in my time and I have to say, I'm quite satisfied with it so far. I must have had the old one for about five years but it was going for a few years before I had it. Probably about eight years in total.

 

My father-in-law gave us our very first laptop sometime in 2002. From what I remember, it was a Dell that has a small memory so the booting takes a lot of time, about 2 minutes. But it was running okay except that it has to be plugged in an electrical socket because the battery had already died. When we canvassed for a new battery, it was so expensive so we did not consider it anymore. After some months of using, the hard disk gave way and we surrendered, just stopped using instead of spending for repairs. It's an old one anyway.

 

Yeah, for some really old laptops, it is not worth it to get replacement parts since some of the model specific parts can be rare and expensive due to the fact they are no longer in production. Money might be better spent toward getting a new laptop instead. However, if your old laptop was getting slow (slower than when it was new), it could mean it needs a clean re-installation of OS. Reinstall the OS can clean up everything and speed things up. Then there is also the option of getting a SSD and more RAM. My mom's old laptop was so slow but after doubled the RAM it was smooth, at least that's what she told me.

Getting a SSD will reduce your boot time to less than 20 seconds. There is also no need to worry about if the laptop dies and the SSD get wasted. You can simply take out the SSD and put it to use in a new laptop or desktop, or even as an external hard drive. As the matter of fact, I upgraded the SSD in my Dell Vostro twice. The first time I got a 128GB SSD to replace the old 160GB HDD back in 2012 I think. Then just months before the laptop died on me last fall in 2015, I upgraded it again to a 512GB SSD due to the almost full 128GB was getting slow (SSD will slow down when it is getting fuller). Just one or two months after the final upgrade, the Dell died on me. I simply got an external hard drive enclosure for the 512GB SSD and now I am using it as an external hard drive for my Surface Pro 4.

 

My Toshiba laptop is 8 years old and counting. I had to buy a replacement because the poor thing kept turning itself off after a while (got too warm because one fan was broken). The laptop was too old, 1 out of 3 USB were functional... so the best choice was buying a new one. The guy who fixes them was honest and told me that was my best choice. So I headed to Walmart and bought this one

 

I've had a few laptops crash and die on me, but for the most part it was an easy fix. I used to use an old Dell, (even older than the one I use now lol...) and had been using it for at least 3-4 years. One day I noticed that it was slowing down a lot, so I ran a simple WD Hard drive test, saw that it failed the test, and so replaced the hard drive.

Laptop is still working to this day, no fan issues, no screen issues, nothing. You'd be surprised how easy it is to keep these laptops running.

 

My laptop lasted 8 years. But actually, it didn't really die after all. Once I emptied it, we got to tinkering around with it. It seems ok but perhaps badly corrupted. We put a fresh install of the original Vista (which is worthless) on it and planned to upgrade to Windows 7. We got messed up on the upgrade and since my nephew is a computer geek, I have asked him to clean it up, do the installs, and look it over. If it is ok, I plan to gift it to someone I know who needs a better computer. I do believe it is ok, from what I observed.

 

I have a tragic story, a laptop died on me while I was doing my college Thesis. It was my main computer and I lost a lot: both code (it involved programing some script for extracting information and meta data from some medical images), and the actual text from the paper I was preparing. It was a Toshiba laptop. Everything died on that laptop, first it was the monitor, I then extracted the disk and used an adapter that allowed me to plug the laptop's hard drive via USB to another computer. The hard drive actually died the day after. Basically everything died at once, I had to actually throw the thing in the garbage as there was nothing to salvage there.