Laptop dieing

[GB_Groundworks]

My mac book pro is dying well the fan is sounds like a hurricane surging every 3 seconds, ordered another fan but out of stock so on iPad for few weeks. So replies might be a bit slow lol.

Not bad for almost 4 years of running continusly

Spelling corrected for Pablo



Edited By GB_Groundworks on 1294191316

[Pablo]

aye your spellchecker's bollocks'd right enough. Tee hee.

[Tony McC]

I usually reckon on 24-30 months lifespan for a laptop. If the chip doesn't overheat, the battery gives up the ghost and it's almost as much for a genuinely decent replacement battery as it is for a new laptop.

On my current model, the HDD and the CD/DVD drive packed up after just 8 months and had to be replaced, but since then, it's been fine, touch chipboard!

My younger daughter got a laptop as part of a broadband/phone deal and it's spent more time in the repair shop than it has in use. The amount she's spent on travelling back and forth to the so-called 'service centre' plus phone calls and time off from work/college, would have more than paid for a *quality* brand machine.

[GB_Groundworks]

my 17" mac book pro was £2k new but has lasted a good 4 or so years and is still fast enough to photoshop raw 20mb images etc, its been all over the world with bands and getting thrown around, dropped, sat on, and like i say its on 24/7. its had beer, red wine and baby sick spilt on it and survived, its scratched and dented etc and ive replaced the drive with a 500gb for more space, its got 4gb of ram.

in those 4 years ive had to change the keyboard once after full large glass of wine went over it, i got a new battery of apple free even though it was 18 months out of warranty, and now the fan, £30 and take me 10 mins to change it myself.

they really are built to last these bad boys, my old dell only lasted about 2 years before it was so slow and battery had gone.

saying that got my old dell tower sat here running bsd and i bought it in 99 that runs 24/7 as well. had a few new fans and disks but thats it,



Edited By GB_Groundworks on 1294232194

[DNgroundworks]

Mines just died

A question for you Giles - A mate of mine who studied this sorta thing who was trying to fix my laptop said computers will get slow after a while because windows automatically saves every mortal thing you do on the machine into files called index.dat files which just continue to grow until the end of the pc's life, apparantley they cannot be deleted??

Microsoft cant give an explanation for why these files do this, say if you delete your cookies they do not get deleted from the index.dat???

[Tommy]

It's a bit like Trigger in Only Fools n Horses. Had the same brush 20 years, just had 4 new handles and 5 broom heads.

[lutonlagerlout]

i find lap -tops to be piss poor in comparison to pcs
bought the daughter a dell inspiron r15 for xmas,charged it for 2 days prior to xmas and the battery lasted about 90 minutes.
all i hear is sob stories about how easy they are to break
waste of time IMHO
bought a canon mp252 pixma printer/copier/scanner from argos for 30 quid before xmas
have to say the quality for that sort of money is unreal,and it comes with ink!
the price almost defies belief
LLL

[Tommy]

I've had a Toshiba something or other for about 3 years before the battery would last no longer than 20 minutes without charging.

Invested in a Dell laptop about 18 months ago, and still performing as if new. Only problem I've had is that one of the volume keys has worked loose,

[remus]

I use an 17" HP Pavilion laptop.
By the sound of it I have been very lucky. It's been running, (Ok on the mains but the battery will still last an hour or so) for 8 - 10 hours a day since the beginning of 2006.

The only thing that did cause a problem back in 2008 was it would not start and came up with an error message. With some help from one of the tech forums I was pointed to the memory modules. Took one out problem still existed. Changed to other, back it came to life with half memory. So purchased two new lots of memory and all was well.


After this number of years was running Very slow ,so over Christmas I re formatted the hard driver and re installed the operating system. I gained about 7 gb of extra space ( I did expect to end up with a bit more ) But the main thing is it now runs like it did when new.

[GB_Groundworks]

Yeah windows is sh1t. Has a registry issue where it boats the registry and slows itself down as it goes, unix rules haha



Edited By GB_Groundworks on 1294262324

[enigmaenigma]

Mines just died

A question for you Giles - A mate of mine who studied this sorta thing who was trying to fix my laptop said computers will get slow after a while because windows automatically saves every mortal thing you do on the machine into files called index.dat files which just continue to grow until the end of the pc's life, apparantley they cannot be deleted??

Microsoft cant give an explanation for why these files do this, say if you delete your cookies they do not get deleted from the index.dat???

Not really as they are just database files which you can delete, and once removed they will be recreated, but the content will only be the new additions as it rebuilds the database – think of it like slate board & chalk, you delete but then rewrite a new list upon it.


Grab a hold of an app like CrapCleaner / CCleaner and that should delete them and countless other junk that gets created via usage. It also has a registry cleaner within it as well, that removes orphan entries as opposed to some that leave it to you to decide if you are running the risk of deleting sensitive and necessary registry files.


However, and when installing CCleaner, ensure you uncheck / deselect any offer to install Yahoo toolbar or the like – because whilst such inclusions fund the app, it’s probably best avoided.


But that said, Windows still has a shelf life or seems to start behaving like those disease that start eating themselves after a while.

[lutonlagerlout]

i have used ccleaner for a few years and it is an outstanding piece of software,i defrag my registry with it every week or so and it speeds things up
glary utilities is another very handy piece of software
thing i dont like about apple is that they install nearly as much rubbish on your system as microsoft
quicktime anyone?
LLL