wchris14 said:
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
