Here is when it will die
How long should you expect a laptop to last? This is a question that is harder to answer than you think. At one point, generational improvements in computer hardware were so drastic that keeping a laptop for more than a year or two didn’t make sense. Today, even entry-level laptops are powerful enough to efficiently meet your normal daily computing needs indefinitely.
This means that the limiting factor is how long the laptop will physically continue to function, and how much time you have left before you have no choice but to replace your current computer is not easy to determine.
Why Laptop Lifespan Isn’t Just About Age
I generally don’t like to make the “cars and computer” analogy, but in this case it makes perfect sense when you think about a car’s mileage. A new car with high mileage may be so worn that it is nearing the end of its useful life. Likewise, an older car that has been well maintained and has low miles may still have decades of service left.
The same goes for any computer, and even more true for laptops. Laptops are feats of engineering, performing a complex dance where heat, power and performance must work well in a very limited physical space. All moving parts wear with use and heat will cause some electronic components to eventually fail.
The more you use the laptop and the harder you run it, the more likely it is that something will break and be too expensive to warrant individual replacement.
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The Usual Suspects: Components Most Likely to Fail First
Although any component of a computer can fail at any time, some have a shorter expected lifespan than others. In a laptop, the main component that dies first is the laptop battery. Current lithium-ion batteries used in devices such as laptops are only designed for a certain number of full charge cycles before losing so much capacity that they are no longer useful. Degrade them enough, they will no longer hold a charge at all and may develop serious malfunctions such as swelling.
In the past, this was hardly a problem. The laptop battery simply came off with the press of a button, and you could even take a few spares with you while traveling. These days, most laptops with replaceable batteries require a little more surgery to complete, and finding a replacement battery isn’t always simple. With some laptop models, replacing the battery would also mean replacing other parts of the laptop, making the price so high that it wouldn’t make sense. This mainly concerns ultra-compact laptops, however.
Next on the chopping block are the mechanical components like your laptop’s keyboard or monitor hinge. On some laptops, keyboards are easy to replace. In some ultra-compact models, they require replacement of the top case, which again makes it too expensive to consider. Hinge failure is a nightmare scenario on a laptop. Although you can often replace the case parts that house the hinge, this is a delicate operation with wiring and display panel transfers potentially involved. So it’s best to leave this task to a technician, and you need to think about the cost in relation to the age and value of the laptop.
A laptop’s cooling system is another key point of failure. Fan bearings wear out, thermal paste ages and loses its properties. An underperforming cooling system can also sneakily reduce the lifespan of solid-state components like SSDs.
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The clock ticking inside your laptop: electronics and storage
Speaking of SSDs, they’re pretty sturdy and should actually last longer than many laptops. I’ve been moving SSDs from old laptops to new ones for years. However, I also messed up cooling an expensive SSD in a laptop, and it died within three years, while probably limiting its performance without me noticing.
SSDs also wear out as you write to them, but in practice modern SSDs have such write endurance that even extreme laptop users who are constantly writing data are unlikely to experience problems. Assuming your SSDs are well cooled, it is not a component likely to limit the lifespan of your laptop, and what’s more, it is easy to replace. The same goes for mechanical hard drives, if your laptop still uses one. However, their mechanical nature makes them less durable. That said, if you still own a laptop with an internal mechanical drive, it’s probably time to buy a new one. At the very least, replace it with a compatible SSD, at least.
Thermal cycling will eventually affect the circuit boards and soldered components of your laptop, leading to connection issues between chips and other components. Due to the narrow confines of a laptop’s chassis, this is technically more of a concern than for desktops. In practice, cracked laptop solder joints are a long-term problem and other parts will likely break first.
RAM also rarely fails, and if it’s inserted it’s simple to replace, but if it’s soldered to the motherboard as is more common these days, that’s often not worth the cost of replacement either, outside of your warranty.
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How to Extend the Life of Your Laptop (And When to Let It Go)
If you want to give your laptop the best chance of lasting a long time, there are a few basics to follow:
Keep it cool! Do not block the vents, remove dust inside and out, and reapply thermal paste between the heatsinks and chips if you experience higher temperatures than when the laptop was new under the same conditions. Do this especially if the laptop is thermally slowing down and simply cleaning the fans and vents isn’t enough. If you use your laptop mostly plugged in, you may want to use a charge limiting feature that stops charging your laptop at a certain percentage. This reduces system heat and can also extend the life of your battery.
Replace the battery with a new one when it reaches the end of its life, which is often estimated to be less than 80% of its original capacity. The same goes for other replaceable components like storage and RAM.
My general rule of thumb is that if a repair costs less than half the cost of a new laptop, it’s still worth it. However, There’s some context here regarding how obsolescent the laptop as a whole is and how long you have until the next component. I expect at least five years of service from a modern laptop, and with good maintenance, double that is not unrealistic.
