Do Laptops Even Die? (or, Why You Shouldn't Throw Out Your Laptop)

My laptop isn't in the best of shape (i.e. it's in the active process of dying), so I've found myself window browsing laptops a fair bit. Every time that I do, I always come back to the feeling that I don't really have to do this. If you look online, the conventional wisdom is that the average lifespan of a laptop is 3-5 years. My laptop is 4 years old, so about the time you would expect for it to die, if you follow the conventional wisdom. The thing is, I don't. My hot take is that even a cheap laptop should last you 10 years if you maintain the hardware components well. From what I can tell, when people say that their laptop is dead, they don't actually mean that it died, they just mean that it's slow. The few articles that explained why laptops only last 3-5 years follow the same line of thought, saying that laptops have to be replaced after that amount of time because the hardware wouldn't be able to keep up with Windows updates. Well, I use Linux, so that's not a problem for me. The main reason why my laptop is dying is that the fans are failing, which threatens to make my already hot computer have uncontrollable thermals eventually. With the way my fans sound, that might happen in a month, but my laptop might stabilize and crawl along for up to a year. Again, still within the 3-5 year estimated lifespan, but not for the reasons that are usually given. Also, it ignores the circumstances behind my laptop failing. I'll admit it, I did not take good care of this thing. I knew that this laptop had bad thermals, but I never even attempted to change the thermal paste until after my computer was no longer able to keep the CPU temperature below 95 C, which it was idling at for years. I'm not talking about normal years, I'm talking about culmative years of usage. I play a lot of games that benefit from AFKing, so I would just leave my laptop running over night, every night, for about 2 years, never dipping below 95 C. All in all, I'd say that my laptop's fans have done about a decade's worth of work in the past 4 years. While I couldn't replace the thermal paste because the screws holding my fan down have seized, I was able to get the heat down by cleaning up the dust that built up inside, removing the battery (which was generating a ton of heat and could barely hold a charge anymore), and getting a cooling pad. I know that not being able to change the thermal paste will come back to bite me down the line, but at least I bought my laptop a month (and counting).

I think that's why I've been a bit obsessed with laptop life expectancy for the past few weeks. Being able to buy at least another month from worn-out fans is impressive, and exactly what every tech article says that I shouldn't be able to do. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, because the tech articles aren't written for more advanced laptop users that want to extend their laptop lifespan as much as possible, they're written for a broad audience that wants the best user experience. I get it, but I don't like it. Replacing a laptop is expensive, contributes to e-waste, and probably means getting a laptop that's lower quality than your current one (looking over all the laptops I've seen online, I haven't seen a single good one). Compared to that, spending $50-70 on peripherals to keep my laptop running for a bit longer is a no-brainer.

I haven't even gotten into replacements for hardware components yet. While I would never even think about trying this, I've seen people with my exact same type of laptop add a water-cooling system to keep a temperatures down better than a fan ever could. A less extreme example would be replacing the hard drive or RAM as your needs evolve. That's how the used Thinkpad community stays thriving despite everybody there using a laptop that's over 10 years old, although a lot of them have replaced so many components, they ended up with a laptop of Theseus that may or may not be the original laptop. Whatever the case may be, it's clear that laptops are a lot more durable than people give them credit for, as long as you're willing to put in a bit of effort to keep them running.

Personally, I plan on using a laptop that's already 10 years old as my daily driver once my current one is unusable. For some reason I don't understand, my mom has kept my sister's old laptop from 2012 hidden away for all these years, so I took it to use as a secondary laptop, not realizing how good it is. Like most laptops from that time period, it has a much better build quality than laptops made nowadays. On top of that, the specs are surprisingly good. A 1 TB hard drive, decent CPU, and only 4 GB of RAM, but an option to upgrade to 8 GB (don't buy the fear-mongering about needing 16 GB of RAM, 8 GB is plenty for most people). I've already played around with it, and it's nice and responsive. With a bit of maintenance, I expect that laptop to last me for years to come.