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How Often Do You Replace Your Computer?

@KatrinaHunt13 I turn my iMac off manually at night but it's set to turn on @ 06:00 so all I have to do is sign in when I get up and go off for my tea. It's ready to go when I get back upstairs. 'Sleeping' isn't really enough to get it to sort itself out and dump all the temp files or whatever the technical term is!
 
berniek said:
I definitely read in this thread that most laptops and Windows desktops are 'done' much earlier then most iMacs.
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Part of that is because of the way windows did their operating system prior to windows 10 (or 8. But I think 10).

In my opinion, part of that is also the sheer amount of windows options made by different suppliers (HP, Lenovo, Dell, Samsung, Toshiba, etc). Like a $400 laptop is probably not going to have the best parts. My mother in law bought a $450 laptop. I went to check on it, and found it was running on 4 GB of RAM. It could only be updated to 8 GB of RAM. It does what she needs - internet and word processing. But it hiccuped because she upgraded her word to the new one from 2010's word. The new word takes more processing power.
 
bestcee said:
Part of that is because of the way windows did their operating system prior to windows 10 (or 8. But I think 10).

In my opinion, part of that is also the sheer amount of windows options made by different suppliers (HP, Lenovo, Dell, Samsung, Toshiba, etc). Like a $400 laptop is probably not going to have the best parts.
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100% agree. Some tech person said (sorry, I can't remember who!) "Apple isn't just a tech company. It's a luxury brand." I've always found that interesting. But in all fairness, I was just price-checking a Mac, and it wasn't that much more than a similar-spec PC. Heck, both have Intel processors lol.

Plus, more viruses are made to target Macs now, and I wonder if that'll start affecting a Mac's lifetime?
 
cookingmylife said:
@KatrinaHunt13 I turn my iMac off manually at night but it's set to turn on @ 06:00 so all I have to do is sign in when I get up and go off for my tea. It's ready to go when I get back upstairs. 'Sleeping' isn't really enough to get it to sort itself out and dump all the temp files or whatever the technical term is!
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ok, clueless here...how do you set it to turn on automatically???
 
berniek said:
I am a 'use it till it dies' kinda girl. Being a student I didn't have the money to replace my laptops just because they got a little slow. Now that I have a proper job and all, I bought myself an iMAC last summer and I know I will replace it when it starts to act up, not wait until it dies. But I hope it's gonna last me a lot more years to come!!

I definitely read in this thread that most laptops and Windows desktops are 'done' much earlier then most iMacs. I hope that's true because I totally used it to justify my purchase last summer! ;)
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Honestly, I think that is the case. Sometimes it's a "you get what you pay for" thing. We discovered this with cars. I bought a brand new Dodge Stratus and traded it after 3.5 years because of issues, and went to a Honda Element. Honda is now 11 years old and no problems at all. Same with roomie...she had a Dodge truck, got rid of it because of problems fairly quickly and then bought a Toyota 4 runner. It's about 13 years old and still going strong!

and...when I bought the last Windows hard drive I paid about 1,000.00 just for the hard drive and it died a month after the year warranty. THAT was the last straw and when I made the jump to a Mac! LOL
 
I buy a new Mac every 2-3 years...or whenever my accountant gets after me and says I need to spend some money on new tech for the business. :giggle I use both a desktop and a laptop depending on what I'm doing and where I am at the time, so I will normally alternate between upgrading one or the other. My last desktop purchase was a Mac Pro, though, and new releases on those are few and far between. I'll probably use it for a good long while.

I have had two Mac laptops that have completely given out on me, and other than that all of my Macs are still in service in some capacity. One was about 5 years old when something or other went wrong with the battery or the power connection inside the case. I had already replaced it with a MacBook Air at that point, so I didn't really worry about it. The MacBook Air (purchased in 2011) actually just wigged out on me a few weeks ago, and it says it has a bad RAM chip. In the Air the RAM is soldered directly to the logic board, and my guess is that the actual solder joints have loosened, much like they did in early XBox consoles. One of these days I'll pull the board and stick it in the oven for 20 minutes or so to see if the solder will reflow and fix the issue. (Yes, that is really how people have fixed their computers!!)

Honestly, I've tried upgrades like adding RAM or switching over to an SSD to extend the useful life of a computer, and I've found that I will get may get another 6-9 months or so out of it before I just can't take the slowness any more and go buy a new one. In those cases I think that the cost-benefit ratio for buying the new computer was better than doing the upgrade, based simply on amortizing the upgrade purchase over the added (usually short) lifespan.
 
@KatrinaHunt13 For auto turn on...

Settings
Energy Saver
Schedule

I just reset mine to shutdown every night at 10 but it seems to me that in the past, shutting down often had a question about needing to save something...e.g. leaving a layout in PSE. I'll see how this works now because it's really hot in this room unless I have the a/c on, and it's not on overnight.
 
I replaced my laptop (5 years old) this past October after I accidentally slopped bullet-proof tea all over the keyboard & shorted out the mother board.
 
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