Old Laptops Are More Trouble Than They're Worth

or just buy a desktop

Only if you hire Geek Squad to fix it for you.

Sounds like another reason we need a better system for recycling electronics.

I've noticed this whole concept with cell phones, too. No matter how well you take care of them, after a few years not only has the technology completely leapfrogged the old models, your 2-3 year old phone is really getting kinda loose and squeaky. The more mobile it is, the more you have to factor in wear and tear! It's not like a desktop machine where you can really extend the life of the machine by changing its duties or making a simple upgrade.

That's why you have to love the technology industry. I have a conspiracy theory. These hardware companies probably have figured out how to make 10GHz 16 Core Laptops that last 20 hours on battery, etc. However, why jump that far ahead when you can release increments every year and charge a premium? It happened with the auto industry.

With a Thinkpad, 5 year is the norm.

That would only hold true if only one laptop developer had figured out all that stuff. If more then one does there will be technology and price wars until all the tech is out on the shelves. Which leads up to the "competition is good" understanding. That is of course assuming there is no collaboration and price fixing between developers, which of course is illegal.

"Plus, the outdated notebooks will cost an organization $9,600 annually per person in lost end-user productivity, Gold said, since a machine that's two generations behind current models takes longer to boot up and runs sluggishly."

That's not a hardware problem. At best it is a perception problem and at worst it means your Windows mess is full of malware again and just needs a restore.

I agree with the warranty and hard drive failure claims but the rest depends on how well the user takes care of it.

I'd be interested in how they think this compares to Apple or any non-Windows OS.

Yea, because dragging a desktop around for mobile troubleshooting is easy.

Sounds like planned obsolescence at work.

Any company that shells out that much to maintain a laptop simply has a poor business model. $960 by itself is way more than enough to pay for IT service, parts, upgrades, troubleshooting,...etc. In 2-3 years you're talking about a performance difference of corei7 vs core2duo. Thats not $960, unless companies are getting the extreme edition to stuff in laptops.

Well, my laptop is 6years old and it´s internal power supply (I may have the wrong name on this) just died 3 days ago, so 2 years is higly suspicious, the only time it needed something was another charger and that costed me 35euros,by the way my 1986 Data General Laptop is still working fine, just lost the Dos Diskett (damn). And no it does not run Crisis!!!!

It didn't stop the gas companies.

My 3 yr-old laptop hasn't costed me a penny to maintain aside from electricity.
What are you talking about!

oh not a slim Dell. those can be prone to overheating, how'd that one make it into the title? I like my personal dell fine enough but you'd have to pay me to buy a dell ever again after what i've seen in the office.

Well, if laptops were a publicly traded commodity on wall street where dell, hp and acer could secretly funnel in money into speculation markets to affect the cost I would say this was a fair comparison.
Anyway, I think laptops are great if you need something portable. Most people I see put laptops on desks and only want to sit on the couch with it.
I also think there is a lesson to be learned from netbooks here. Ssd drives and lack of a cd drive make a computer a lot more reliable.

My 1 year Latitude has never failed me; also I have owned a Sony Vaio for almost 6 years and it's working flawlessly I only had to replace its hard drive and did a memory upgrade on it about 3 years ago, spent around $70, although it's a little slow for my current requirements.

I had to convince my employer over a year ago to upgrade the RAM from 512 to 1GB, I couldn't run any of my applications. I left that site, then came back recently, and I think I got the exact same laptop. It's now like 6 years old (running a 1.6GHz Pentium M, not even good in 2003). Needless to say, I have to wait 5 minutes every morning just for the apps that are already up and running to start responding (and no, I don't even suspend my computer).

And stupid tech depts don't allow you to do registry optimization or defrags. My piece of junk at work takes 5 minutes to start up. If I didn't secretly open up my case at night to upgrade the ram, it'd be even worse. My career goal is to be CEO not because of the wealth or power it brings - but to order the tech dept. to shut the hell up when I'm bypassing their draconian email rules and network filters.

My first thinkpad lasted for 7 years before I replaced it, and that was mainly due to the hassles of trying to get a wireless card working with win2k.
I got it in 2001 and last I heard it was still working fine one of my relatives who uses it to take notes in class & play music.

My 2nd thinkpad (purchased last year) works great and actually plays some games better than my desktop.

But neither of them were "cheap" .. I paid $2k for them new and I got what I paid for.

When you skimp on the pricetag, normally you endup skimping on quality which will come back & bite you in the a$$

You have to think of this as a fleet of laptops. Sure one may last 10 years but how many out of the fleet of 10 to 1000s have problems. The average business laptop is normally covered for 3 years after that the parts are the owners problem.

For personal use I have the same T40 with 2GB of ram and it works fine. The fan is failing but that's a 60.00 cost to replace vs. 300 for a new laptop that may in fact fail during the same time I kept the T40.

Here is a nice video about consumption.
http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Hmm... sounds interesting to me. "This analysis company says that you should stimulate the economy rather than attempt to stretch your dollar because it -might- end up costing you more."

Here we have a failure in simple logic that's practiced all over the place. Spend X amount of dollars to prevent having to possibly spend Y. Insurance, extended warranties, service plans are one way... advanced unnecessary replacement of products are another. You're gambling. It's a game of chance. You can analyze statistically, but statistics are NEVER indicitave of an individual result. Just because the 'average person' has to spend $960 to maintain a laptop for 3 years, does not apply to me. I have had to spend $0 to 'maintain' my laptop for 3 years. Guess what? Under those statistics, I just MADE $960... where's my check? It's absurd.

Remember, 73% of statistics are made up on the spot and four out of five dentists think the fifth is a jerk and should just get with the ****'ing program. This is data... and useless data at that. I think the money spent to come up with this statistic should be spent to feed starving children... or... you know... by laptops for them... or something.

well by the logic of this article my laptop is soon be more trouble than its worth. although in my opinions i cant possibly see how my laptop is going to cost me anything other than the cost of powering it and a OS upgrade to Win7.

@njkid3 - And you can get a Win7 upgrade for 29.99 from http://tinyurl.com/yaphg92

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.

"So there you have it – yet another reason to have shiny new things more often!" ^_^

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....