I'm just wondering how long laptops usually last? I did a quick google search and read that they last 3 years and then the hardware goes bad.I sure hope thats not true for every laptop.I currently have a HP Notebook.I've had it for almost a year.I got it in April 2017,but yesterday was the first time it's ever used for internet. Maybe some of you orgers have had laptops that lasted longer than 3 years?

thanks in advance

also,what can i do to make my laptop last longer?

20+ years. If no mechanical breakdown. Depends what you want to do with it. dont expect to play new games on an old laptop.

If you like/need to use up-to-date software and stuff, than count 3-5 years.

[Edited 1/21/18 5:58am]

TheFman said:

20+ years. If no mechanical breakdown. Depends what you want to do with it. dont expect to play new games on an old laptop.

If you like/need to use up-to-date software and stuff, than count 3-5 years.

[Edited 1/21/18 5:58am]

i have never played games on my laptop and dont intend to.I only use it for internet and to listen to music on my windows media player

EmmaMcG said:

I had my previous laptop for about 8 years and it technically still works. I only got a new one because I had intended on using it for playing games that wouldn't run on my older one but it turned out to be a waste of money because I'm only using it for downloading music. Which I could do on my old laptop. There's no reason why your laptop will stop working properly after 3 years. As long as you're not throwing it around or anything. It's like anything else, if you take care of it it will continue to work.

thanks for the reply.

Depends on the technology. Through the late 90s and aughts, technology developed so fast into more memory, bigger hard drives, then dual and now quad cores. I feel like now it's sort of settled into a good zone. The thing now is the Ghz of the processor.

So, based on all that, I don't see a real end date on a good laptop. I still have an old Dell Precision M90 that I use solely for recording vinyl to digital. I keep it put away until I need it. The M90 dates to 2006, and it weighs almost 9lbs. It's a brick! But it works for that purpose, and I'll always have it.

I have another Precision M5400, much newer that I use for some graphic design and book editing. It's a stand by. It's a workhorse for me sometimes, depending on what I'm doing. I am not a Dell fan, but my roommate worked in a field that dealt with a lot of Dell computers. So we never went without RAM or even a new shell to build up on our own. The Precisions are workstations; very sturdy, made to handle being tossed around on worksites, etc. (The Inspiron is trash, and the Latitude is a lightweight home computer at best.)

My main computer is a Macbook Air from late 2014. The limitation is that I can't upgrade the RAM if I wanted to (and I do sometimes), but it's not a huge issue for me.

In short, if you research which one will do the job for your needs, stick to a good name brand, get the extended warranty, and take care of it*, you should have it for a long while. Solid state drives help the life of a computer these days, because it decreases the moving parts problem (like being dropped and an older hard drive forever being unusable).

* - take care meaning keep your hard drive cleaned up, use two cloud services to store things (like an in-home cloud like WD MyCloud or whatever, plus a service like Google Drive or Dropbox - there are many to choose from that are free), it will run great for a long, long time.

I've had mine for five years and counting...