How long did your Lenovo IdeaPad last for?

Do they last pretty long (>5 years) and are they easy to upgrade? Thanks for your input!

 

>5 years? I think with consumer grade laptops, you will be lucky to get 3 years out of them.

If you need your laptop to last >5 years, get a Thinkpad T, X or W series and get a 3 years warranty at the bare minimum.

 

+1. I see too many people buy consumer grade laptops to do business work, and it's awful. As a wise man once said, you get what you paid for.

As stated above, you are really looking for a Thinkpad with that extended warranty.

 

I would expect about 2 years or so until it starts to fall apart but there are so many factors that go into something like this. I have seen a decent amount of posts of older Ideapads where the hinges break/snap/crack and component issues.

5 years is pushing it for any laptop let alone a cheaper consumer laptop.

 

It really depends on how you treat your laptop. I have plenty of friends who are using their old Core Duo computers (about 4 years old) and they're still going strong, but on the other side of the spectrum, I have friends with relatively-new Core i_ laptops that are on their last legs already.

Even so, the other posters are correct in that you would be lucky to get through more than 5 years of daily usage on most notebooks. A more solidly-built business-grade laptop (Thinkpad, Dell Latitude, HP Elitebook, etc) would have a better chance of surviving that long.

 

If you want longevity, go for business class - My Thinkpads have always been tanks, and my mother's Vostro is as good as day one - aside from the battery cells being just about shot (her fault, I told her how to maintain it) and the power cable getting worn to shreds from her bending it and sitting the laptop on it from time to time. My mother is rough on technology, but for what it's worth, the Vostro is holding up admirably.

My last Thinkpad, an X41, is still in use today, and for a roughly 6 year old PC, its still doing splendidly. Same situation with the battery, although it lasted a lot longer than the aforementioned Dell. As others are saying here, "business grade" notebooks are made to be more robust, and tougher than the consumer grade competition.

 

It's my opinion that plain old dumb luck plays the preponderant role in whether things work out and it's hard to quantify. I've seen junk $400 laptops that were abused and just kept on working. I've also seen "good laptops" that were babied and for some reason died unexpectedly. The benefit of a "good laptop" is you'll get better support if you're under warranty and the better quality tilts the odds in favor of a well built machine to some degree, but each machine has its own story.

 

Definitely true as well, particularly with the components of a laptop. A hard drive failure, for example, is plain bad luck and really doesn't matter how well-built a machine is (unless the failure results from you dropping the machine...).

 

I wouldn't consider a hard drive failure to be something that would permanently break a machine, either. They wear out or go bad, and for $50 and 10 mins of your time they are easily replaced.

I wouldn't consider a laptop to be broken, really, until it has a fried GPU/motherboard (even a CPU can be replaced), or structural damage. Possibly a non-functional screen as well, depending on ease and cost of replacement.

My wife has an old Dell from 2005 with a Pentium M sitting in the closet, she abused the hell out of that thing (it gets about 30 mins to a charge when not plugged in) and then I used it as a work computer for close to a year (and I was a safety inspector so this involved lugging it around with me every day to different properties, leaving it locked in the hot car while I went in somewhere, etc.) before finally replacing it with a netbook and leaving it sitting in the closet, powered on, at close to 100% CPU load 24/7 for the good part of 2 or 3 months (emulating old crap, don't ask). This same laptop survived a car accident (my window did not, and shards of glass tore up the screen pretty bad, but $80 later it was good as new minus a few scratches in the case), and although it hasn't been used for close to a year now, and the battery is surely completely dead, I'm sure that it would still turn on and run fine if asked.

 

I gotta also second plain dumb luck. I've only had 1 hard drive fail on me, other than that, none of my notebook and my parents computers have really had ANY issues...still got a Pentium 2 Toshiba notebook that still works..

Though buying business oriented notebooks does increase your chance of getting a more durable, reliable notebook there are no guarantees. Plenty of business notebooks on that defective Nvidia chips list unfortunately.

 

My Latitude LM, with its Pentium I, with MMX (oh boy!) is still working... The business lines do last.

 

What do you even use that for? Can you still run ANYTHING relevant on that computer?

 

I sometimes run... paint.
It was FAST back in the day... It even came with 8mb of ram that I upgraded to 40mb. I mean, 133 entire MHz of power! Sorry, blurry.