Practical computer life.

I have retired my 9 yo computer after many troublesome adventures with
faulty Sata sockets and/or a worn-out motherboard.

What is a reasonable life expectancy for an off-the-shelf computer
these days?

P

On Fri, 04 Oct 2019 07:41:38 +1000, Peter Jason wrote:

I have retired my 9 yo computer after many troublesome adventures with
faulty Sata sockets and/or a worn-out motherboard.

What is a reasonable life expectancy for an off-the-shelf computer
these days?

Until it breaks or until it fails to do what you need, whichever comes
first.

If you're looking for a specific number of years, I think it would depend
on exactly what you started with, what you're using it for, and what your
expectations are. In my 40-years experience, computers don't 'wear out' in
the traditional sense of the phrase. Pieces may fail, in which case you
have to decide whether it makes sense to replace the failed piece or
replace the whole thing.

On Fri, 04 Oct 2019 07:41:38 +1000, Peter Jason wrote:

I have retired my 9 yo computer after many troublesome adventures with
faulty Sata sockets and/or a worn-out motherboard.

What is a reasonable life expectancy for an off-the-shelf computer
these days?



Computers don't really have "life expectancy." They don't die.
Components within them die. Components can usually easily be replaced,
often at a very modest price. So a computer can last forever if you
just keep replacing dead or failing components.

And by the way, its being off-the-shelf doesn't really affect the
point I'm making. Whether it's off-the-shelf or custom-built,
components die and components can be replaced.

So for example, in your case, you could have replaced the motherboard
rather than the whole computer.

Much the same is true of cars; they can also last forever if you just
keep replacing dead or failing components. The big difference between
computers and cars is that car parts can be much more expensive, and
replacing them may not be a wise thing to do.

On Fri, 04 Oct 2019 07:41:38 +1000, Peter Jason wrote:

I have retired my 9 yo computer after many troublesome adventures with
faulty Sata sockets and/or a worn-out motherboard.

What is a reasonable life expectancy for an off-the-shelf computer
these days?

P

Nine years ain't bad.. The OS, and drivers are in planned
obsolescence by then. I still use XP and Linux myself, and since the
computer does what I need, I have no burning need to get the latest
and greatest...

There is no life expectancy that I'm aware of. The drives are usually
specified as "mean time between failures" of so many months, or
operations (reads or writes). But the motherboard has no components
that should fail on a schedule - you may get problems with a bad batch
of electrolytic capacitors, or tin dendrites forming on lead-free
boards. But leave the MB alone, clean the dust out once in awhile and
it should go for a very long time.

Mother Board sockets have an almost unlimited life expectancy because
they aren't intended to be used very often, if at all. The only thing
on the mother board that is going to fail is the CMOS battery and that
will only fail if the computer is disconnected from the mains for a
protracted period.

If you find yourself plugging in hard drives frequently, for some good
reason... consider using an external hard drive connector or a USB 3
adapter if the mobo supports it. The connectors on the back of the
box are rugged and designed to take some use, but the internal ones
are intended to see only a few uses their entire lifetime.

On 03/10/2019 22:41, Peter Jason wrote:
I have retired my 9 yo computer after many troublesome adventures with
faulty Sata sockets and/or a worn-out motherboard.

What is a reasonable life expectancy for an off-the-shelf computer
these days?

P

20 years.



--
With over 1,000,000 million devices now running Windows 10, customer
satisfaction is higher than any previous version of windows.

On 10/3/2019 5:02 PM, Jeff-Relf.Me@. wrote:
Peter Jason asked:
I have retired my 9 yo computer after many troublesome
adventures with faulty Sata sockets and/or a worn-out motherboard.

What is a reasonable life expectancy for
an off-the-shelf computer these days ?

A PC loses half of its value each year.
After 9 years, it's lost 99.8% ( 1-.5^9 ) of its value;
inflation devalues it further.


faster than that, they build the laptops cheap now, flimsy, use ssd
which degrades

In article , Sergio
wrote:

faster than that, they build the laptops cheap now, flimsy, use ssd
which degrades

hard drives degrade faster.

Peter Jason wrote:
I have retired my 9 yo computer after many troublesome adventures with
faulty Sata sockets and/or a worn-out motherboard.

What is a reasonable life expectancy for an off-the-shelf computer
these days?

Computers rarely wear out. I don't think I've ever replaced a computer
simply due to a hardware failure.

It comes down to whether you want to run the latest software. New versions
are always hungrier than old ones. If you never update the software, then
you can expect 7+ years easily.

However, not updating is a risk because security vulnerabilities or things
becoming unsupported. Buy a new device and it might not work with your out
of date software. It's also hard to avoid updates nowadays as they're
mostly automatic.

Don't buy the cheapest out there, stick to a well established brand and
with care you could get 7-9 years out of a new machine.

On Fri, 4 Oct 2019 07:58:23 -0000 (UTC), Chris
wrote:

Peter Jason wrote:
I have retired my 9 yo computer after many troublesome adventures with
faulty Sata sockets and/or a worn-out motherboard.

What is a reasonable life expectancy for an off-the-shelf computer
these days?

Computers rarely wear out. I don't think I've ever replaced a computer
simply due to a hardware failure.

It comes down to whether you want to run the latest software. New versions
are always hungrier than old ones. If you never update the software, then
you can expect 7+ years easily.

However, not updating is a risk because security vulnerabilities or things
becoming unsupported. Buy a new device and it might not work with your out
of date software. It's also hard to avoid updates nowadays as they're
mostly automatic.

Don't buy the cheapest out there, stick to a well established brand and
with care you could get 7-9 years out of a new machine.

I have a Dell XPS 8300 made on Jan 25, 2010 and loaded with XP. I've
changed drives once for increased size but apart from that it has
given me no problem. It's now running Windows 10 Pro.

--


Eric Stevens

There are two classes of people. Those who divide people into
two classes and those who don't. I belong to the second class.

nospam wrote:

Sergio wrote:

faster than that, they build the laptops cheap now, flimsy, use ssd
which degrades

hard drives degrade faster.

Indeed. Sergio showing-off his "intelligence", again. A spinner is
much more likely to fail suddenly and catastrophically, as well.

--
'simple deduction indicates your beef must be "when" it's used.' -
"Steve Carroll", snittishly conjuring-up a "beef" with something that
I had said was a "nice feature".

On Fri, 04 Oct 2019 12:50:41 +1000, Peter Jason wrote:

On Thu, 03 Oct 2019 18:41:55 -0400, default
wrote:

On Fri, 04 Oct 2019 07:41:38 +1000, Peter Jason wrote:

I have retired my 9 yo computer after many troublesome adventures with
faulty Sata sockets and/or a worn-out motherboard.

What is a reasonable life expectancy for an off-the-shelf computer
these days?

P

Nine years ain't bad.. The OS, and drivers are in planned
obsolescence by then. I still use XP and Linux myself, and since the
computer does what I need, I have no burning need to get the latest
and greatest...

There is no life expectancy that I'm aware of. The drives are usually
specified as "mean time between failures" of so many months, or
operations (reads or writes). But the motherboard has no components
that should fail on a schedule - you may get problems with a bad batch
of electrolytic capacitors, or tin dendrites forming on lead-free
boards. But leave the MB alone, clean the dust out once in awhile and
it should go for a very long time.

Mother Board sockets have an almost unlimited life expectancy because
they aren't intended to be used very often, if at all. The only thing
on the mother board that is going to fail is the CMOS battery and that
will only fail if the computer is disconnected from the mains for a
protracted period.

If you find yourself plugging in hard drives frequently, for some good
reason... consider using an external hard drive connector or a USB 3
adapter if the mobo supports it. The connectors on the back of the
box are rugged and designed to take some use, but the internal ones
are intended to see only a few uses their entire lifetime.

I have gone with an NUC i7 computer (very portable) with a large
powered USB hub. All my other HDDs are in an external 8-bay USB3
itself connected to a power source and one of the USB ports on the
hub. It is all working very well and I notice no loss of speed
compared to the old full-tower unit.

I've been lusting after some of those little NUC boxes. What model did
you get and what do you like/dislike about it? (and, dare I ask? What
did you pay for it?)

I've fooled around with a few EEE boxes, but they aren't in the same
league as the NUC. But I figure they are nice to have around if the
main computer goes down. Lightening has already eaten a couple of
modems, a KVM switch, several wall-warts, etc.. I'm a retired
electrical engineer and like to tinker with a lot of different stuff.

On 10/4/2019 8:06 AM, chrisv wrote:
nospam wrote:

Sergio wrote:

faster than that, they build the laptops cheap now, flimsy, use ssd
which degrades

hard drives degrade faster.

Indeed. Sergio showing-off his "intelligence", again. A spinner is
much more likely to fail suddenly and catastrophically, as well.


that's great news! I just upgraded a laptop w 1T SSD.
It has gotten cheap now, may upgrade the internal M2 from 128 to 1T.


I have had 4 or more HD's fail.

one degraded slowly as I used the computer, had more and more sectors go
bad with time, got more errattic, and took loads of time to do stuff,
took about 3 days to DIE.

another was an $80 1T slim external, dropped a corner of it only 1/2"
while spinnng, and I guess the head went off. Hozed, a gonner.

another $80 1T external just stopped one day.

another laptop, internal HD just stopped.

Backup I use external HDs, THumb Drives, some DVDs, all three.


someone gave me 2 HP's to fix, one was huge screen, it had overheating
problem, poor design for heat removal from CPU, lost Win 7 on it,
loaded linux Mint on, but it kept haveing wierd errors, could only be
CPU error stuff, tossed it. The other HP was smaller, but the CPU was
fried, tossed that too. too old too.

Ive found the heat dissipation design sucks for almost all Chinese
designed items.

On 2019-10-03 17:41, Peter Jason wrote:
I have retired my 9 yo computer after many troublesome adventures with
faulty Sata sockets and/or a worn-out motherboard.

What is a reasonable life expectancy for an off-the-shelf computer
these days?

P


Heh. We still have an old Pentium system running W2K in use. It talks to
an equally old imagesetter. It started out running NT4 before getting an
upgrade to both RAM and OS. We have replaced the original drive as well,
but everything else is still original equipment. It's over 20 years old.
The imagesetter cost over $150,000 when it was new and we're going to
get as much use out of it as we can before buying a replacement. The
imagesetter driver for W2K will probably work in XP, but almost
certainly won't work in Vista or later, so that when the old Pentium
dies that'll be it for that imagesetter unless we repurpose an old XP
system, of which we have several, mostly talking to old hardware.

On 10/3/19 5:03 PM, Ken Blake wrote:
On Fri, 04 Oct 2019 07:41:38 +1000, Peter Jason wrote:


[snip]

Computers don't really have "life expectancy." They don't die.
Components within them die. Components can usually easily be replaced,
often at a very modest price. So a computer can last forever if you
just keep replacing dead or failing components.

[snip]

Near the end of August, we had a series of electrical brownouts (AC
voltage got to less than half of what it should be). The only fatality
in my house was a desktop computer. Replacing the power supply was
enough to fix it. Another desktop was like that too (replacing power
supply fixed everything).

On one of those computers, the ATX12V connector was hard to get to
(requiring removing a case fan and using a tool), but that was still a
lot easier and faster than setting up a new PC.

A laptop may be resistant to electrical disturbances because of the battery.

--
82 days until the winter celebration (Wed, Dec 25, 2019 12:00:00 AM for
1 day).

Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"You didn't hear it You didn't see it..." ...how absurd it all seems
without any proof" -- from "Tommy" by 'The Who'

On 10/3/19 7:48 PM, nospam wrote:
In article , Sergio
wrote:

faster than that, they build the laptops cheap now, flimsy, use ssd
which degrades

hard drives degrade faster.

One important consideration with a laptop is how easy it is to replace
the hard drive. Some just require removing one screw and unplugging the
drive. Others make you disassemble the whole thing.

--
82 days until the winter celebration (Wed, Dec 25, 2019 12:00:00 AM for
1 day).

Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"You didn't hear it You didn't see it..." ...how absurd it all seems
without any proof" -- from "Tommy" by 'The Who'