life span
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From: wchris14 on 28 Feb 2010 20:26 what is the life expectancy on dell's latitude e5500?
From: Tom Dacon on 28 Feb 2010 23:35
"wchris14" <wchris14(a)discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message news:C4356CCA-C22A-4580-992F-87223C5A5C1A(a)microsoft.com... > what is the life expectancy on dell's latitude e5500? While this is not specific to that particular model, in general the life expectancy of a computer is tied to the life expectancy of the electromechanical components - in particular the life expectancy of things like the hard drives. You may notice that if you go off shopping for hard drives, you will find warranties for consumer-quality hard drives in the neighborhood of three years. When a hardware manufacturer grants a warranty of three years, that's not how long the manufacturer expects the hard drive to live - it's a calculated figure that minimizes its liability for replacement. So your hard drive may, on average, last that long or probably longer, perhaps up to five years or more, but somewhere in that range you should not be surprised if it fails. Solid-state components like CPUs and memory chips and so forth have better longevity but are affected by a couple of things - principally the number of start-stop cycles (cold boots) and gamma ray hits (infrequent). But generally they have a much longer life than the electromechanical components. If I try to make a computer last a good long while, I expect to replace hard drives at around five years. I may replace a video card during that time too, not necessarily to prevent failure but instead to boost video performance. My own current desktop machine is now seven years old, which is much longer than I usually keep a computer without replacement. My ordinary replacement cycle around ten or fifteen years ago was three years. At that time it was fairly short because of the rapid advances in CPU speed and video graphics. Now, because the curve of performance increase has flattened out I extend my replacement cycle to about five years - just about how long you can expect a hard drive to run without problems. I replaced the hard drives on my current desktop machine about a year ago, along with a new power supply and video card, which basically rewound the clock on its reliability. It's slower than I would like, but it should hold out for another year or so, when I will replace it with a completely new machine. Hope this helps your decision-making process, Tom Dacon Dacon Software Consulting |