"dennis@home" wrote in message
...
OT: What is a reasonable life for a laptop regarding the SOGA?


The wife tells her 92 year old husband that another of his friends has died.

"When and how" he asks.

"Yesterday afternoon and they say it was just old age" replies the wife.

"Yep, that old age thing will get ya' everytime" says the hubby, drawing on
his cigarette and taking another swig from his glass of whiskey.

It's not the item that grows old and dies or wears out, it's the use and
abuse it gets when in service that determines its life expectancy. If any
machine is treated well, including the human machine, it seems to keep them
going for much longer than everyone would expect. A little maintenance and
TLC every so often, and you keep the thing going until old age gets you.
:-)

Cordless goods need replacement batteries at least every four to five years,
because the cells do become burnt with even the slightest use. A whirring,
screaming hard drive that goes on and on every day, all day, will also have
a life expectancy of about five to six at most. Where a hard drive that
gets used hard for only an hour every day may last fifty to sixty years.

Modern electronics are much more reliable than goods bought just ten years
ago, so the innards, the not moving or solid state parts, should go and go
and go in normal use. Even if they are run hard 24 / 7 / 365. They
shouldn't loose their quality at all, unless bashed about.

So. How long is a piece of string? The batteries, disks and hard drives
are the only things that should be looked at changing on a fairly regular
basis, but everything else should keep going for a whole lot longer.

Look after yourself. :-)

On Jul 8, 1:37*am, "BigWallop" wrote:

Modern electronics are much more reliable than goods bought just ten years
ago, so the innards, the not moving or solid state parts, should go and go
and go in normal use. *Even if they are run hard 24 / 7 / 365. *They
shouldn't loose their quality at all, unless bashed about.

What a load of Wallops.

Read up on lead free solder and tin whiskers before posting about
reliability of modern electronics.

Then learn about endurance of consumer grade FLASH memory.

MBQ

Man at B&Q wrote:
On Jul 8, 1:37 am, "BigWallop" wrote:

Modern electronics are much more reliable than goods bought just ten years
ago, so the innards, the not moving or solid state parts, should go and go
and go in normal use. Even if they are run hard 24 / 7 / 365. They
shouldn't loose their quality at all, unless bashed about.

What a load of Wallops.

Read up on lead free solder and tin whiskers before posting about
reliability of modern electronics.


Those are not inherent problems..

Then learn about endurance of consumer grade FLASH memory.

Which is fine as long as its not written to often. So fine for storing
system params: Less so as hard drive replacements.



MBQ

On Jul 8, 1:28*pm, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:
Man at B&Q wrote:
On Jul 8, 1:37 am, "BigWallop" wrote:

Modern electronics are much more reliable than goods bought just ten years
ago, so the innards, the not moving or solid state parts, should go and go
and go in normal use. *Even if they are run hard 24 / 7 / 365. *They
shouldn't loose their quality at all, unless bashed about.

What a load of Wallops.

Read up on lead free solder and tin whiskers before posting about
reliability of modern electronics.

Those are not inherent problems..

No but they have caused quite serious reliability problems.


Then learn about endurance of consumer grade FLASH memory.

Which is fine as long as its not written to often. So fine for storing
system params: Less so as hard drive replacements.

Nor in some MP3 players.

I could also mention the Xbox debacle.

MBQ

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember "BigWallop"
saying something like:

A whirring,
screaming hard drive that goes on and on every day, all day, will also have
a life expectancy of about five to six at most. Where a hard drive that
gets used hard for only an hour every day may last fifty to sixty years.

Thousands of hard drives used 24/7 just keep going, way past the
five/six year mark. Once they get a bit old, stopping and starting them
seems to be a bad idea, though. Otoh, I've seen plenty of lightly used
ones peg out before they should have - various makes.