What do you do if you want to minimize having to fix your laptop ?

What do you do if you want to minimize having to fix your laptop ?

having to fix a laptop.

Is long

and disastrous, a massive pain.

What do you do if you want to minimize having to fix your laptop ?

How do you make sure the laptop you buy is reliable and wont' break? What are the guidlines? Once you have the laptop what can you do to make sure it doesn't break aside from not constantly overtaxing it with too many tasks?

 

First thing is to make a recovery USB or DVD. Backup the entire C: and D: recovery partisans with a good software such as Acronis 2014. If you download any updates do a custom install and don't download any packaged programs for 3rd party advertisers. Run a good Anti-virus and update it. Once a month backup you entire system and rotate external hard drives, in case a virus attacks. If you PC slows down, like in a year, revert back to a good clone copy of the C: If you make a mistake and download a bunch or unwanted programs, uninstall them and if they won't uninstall, download Revo uninstaller to delete them that way. If your too lazy to do all this hire a person to maintain your system to do the above. You almost have to be a mechanic before you can drive the car nowadays. If your using windows 8.1 I would recommend classic shell for free to make it look like Windows7 and go with the Aero-Lite setup. I tell people this all the time, but nobody listens so they usually end up calling me up and crying and I tell them they have to spend more money and time to re install the operating system once a year to make it function like new again.

 

All of the above is true as far as data is concerned. Personally, I just cloud sync all of my important documents and only backup things I can't re-download. Everything else, like my games, I can just download again with my fast internet connection.

There's a lot more to maintenance than data though. First order of business is usually to repaste your heatsink. Even the best manufacturers tend to use too much paste. Repasting yourself will guarantee that the paste is applied perfectly. As long as your laptop has a removable panel, anyone can do this with one of the many guides on this forum. Arctic Silver 5 is generally regarded as the best bang for the buck as it does not need to cure and can be used immediately. Diamond ICH7 is a little more expensive, but cools slightly better than AS5.

Also, buy a cooler. There are many popular options, but a 2 or 3 fan is usually superior (though louder) as it will blow air straight through vents all over the bottom of the laptop.

Do not leave it lying around plugged in. The leading cause of laptop death that I see is power related. Either it gets the charger yanked out and breaks the port, or the laptop is left plugged into a non-surge-protected outlet and a surge kills the PCB.

NEVER leave stuff on the keyboard and walk away. That is how people break their screen, almost every time. They walk away leaving something on the keyboard and some do-gooder comes along and closes it, thinking they are helpful. Boom, broken screen.

Mind your hard drive sleep and wake settings. Laptop hard drives tend to go out faster than desktop ones, due to the more cramped conditions and harder use. If you constantly open and close your laptop, you may want to configure your drive not to immediately sleep, so that it isn't stopping and starting 20 times a day. This only applies to disk drives. SSDs lifetime is solely based on total lifetime read/writes.

Clean out dust frequently! A can of compressed air is your friend.

This last part is a little icky, but as a guy who opens up many laptops to discover the filth inside, has to be said. No fluids near the laptop. The most common ones I see inside are beer and yes, let's face it, human semen. It's gross to talk about, but often opening a broken laptop is like being a CSI at a crime scene, except the owner of the laptop is the perpetrator.

That's a few good starter tips.

 

I refrain from turning it on/off too often. When it's on, I leave it on for as long as I can. Majority of critical hardware failures happen during the start/stop cycle.

On top of that, I clean the vents/fans/heatsinks regularly (once every 3 months or so) and along with that repaste the CPU and the GPU.

 

Repasting every 3 months? Is that not a little over the top? I am with the mind that once a year is good enuff.... every 18 months is OK. Many dont even bother at all till their laptop breaks.

 

Well, to clean the heatsinks/vents/fans properly I need to take both cooling systems apart, so repasting is a necessity.

 

Buy three. use them in rotation.

Keeping out of areas with excessive dust (including badly cleaned homes) also helps.

 

Well first off, in order to reduce the time I need to spend repairing my laptops, I buy nothing but business-class laptops. Consumer-class laptops are too fragile and unreliable for me to consider using one for any serious work. If you're serious about reliability, you shouldn't even be looking at anything other than Latitude E6xxxxs, Precisions, Thinkpad X/T/Ws, and Elitebooks/ZBooks (Fujistu also makes good business-class laptops, but I'm not very familiar with what's what with them). And if you're very, very serious about reliability, you should only be looking at Toughbooks and related models.

That said, I take my laptops apart every few months for a "deep dusting" (ie: take an air can and spray all the dust and whatnot from the vents and around the internal electronics). I also spray out the keyboard a bit more often to get crumbs and other particles out from under the keys, to help prevent any of them from breaking off from too much crap under the key. More rarely than the deep dusting, I'll repaste the CPU/GPU on my W520 (haven't bothered on my X61t yet), though I haven't done that for about a year since the W520's on loan to my brother for now. Also, I don't use my laptops in my lap, partly because heat ages your electronics faster and partly because heat also helps to sterilize men(!). I don't bother with a cooler pad though since if a laptop's getting too hot while on a proper surface (hard top, and maybe with a bit of spacing between the surface and laptop bottom), there's either something wrong with your paste or there's something fundamentally wrong with the laptop's thermal design. And if lightning is around in the area, I will unplug my laptops/desktop if I feel that the lightning is strong enough to do any significant damage.

As far as laptop treatment goes, with business-class laptops I don't bother being too careful with mine (I don't baby them like you are required to with consumer-class). I don't bother with a laptop case or with being gentle moving them around. I throw mine onto soft surfaces when I want (bed, couch, etc.) and I will sometimes drop them at an angle on a hard surface (say, the battery is touching the table, then I'll slip my fingers out from under the front of the laptop and let it drop). Worst that has ever happen to me with this sort of treatment is that every blue moon my SSD will slip out slightly from the SATA port on my X61t, but only because my brother broke off the HDD bay door and it's held there by tape now.

Also, I "accidentally" follow Vogelbung's advice on having multiple computers to use. All my important stuff is on Dropbox (soon to be migrated to my own server due to Dropbox's recent decline in privacy policy, once I get OwnCloud set up) and I keep plenty of backups on separate, external drives, so it's trivial for me to, say, use my desktop or T100 for school work and whatnot if my X61t suddenly dies on me or something.

 

You mean if you think the lightning is likely to strike a nearby power line and cause a surge, right? I'm pretty sure all lightning is strong enough to damage electronics.

 

Yeah, that's probably a better way of putting it. Or, more accurately, if it's right on top of my apartment or something.