Glitchy laptop? Its not that old!

[Soloist]

For laptops, it is all about heat. Heat kills, and the hard drive is the #1 source. Apple has a complex heat monitoring system in laptops, as well as Mac Minis. For the Minis, I just disconnect it and do not reinstall it. It has no further use.

J.M.

My primary issue with heat has always been the CPU personally...

Memory is my first wall, second is the hard drive, third is the CPU in terms of speed.

Power supply and hard drives are almost always the first to go in computers.

[Ken]

For laptops, it is all about heat. Heat kills, and the hard drive is the #1 source. Apple has a complex heat monitoring system in laptops, as well as Mac Minis. For the Minis, I just disconnect it and do not reinstall it. It has no further use.

J.M.

My primary issue with heat has always been the CPU personally...

Memory is my first wall, second is the hard drive, third is the CPU in terms of speed.

Power supply and hard drives are almost always the first to go in computers.

I've probably had 2 dozen laptops for work and personal use over the years. Every single one that ever failed was a mechanical hard drive failure. Every single one.

These days I only get laptops that have SSD drives which are faster and more reliable. Also much more expensive. To accommodate the higher cost I usually get less storage space and rely on cloud storage for archived stuff for which I don't need constant access. In other words, I'd much rather buy a 500GB SSD drive laptop and use cloud storage for extra files than buy a 2GB mechanical HD and keep all the files local. Mostly it's just photos and videos anyway.

Every critical file or document I ever work on is also automatically saved to cloud backup. All the work stuff is done this way automatically to work-managed Google Drive. And all my personal files of every kind are automatically saved to DropBox.

If I lose a laptop due to mechanical failure, theft, water damage, etc. I can move onto a new one completely seamlessly with no loss of anything except time.

[steve-in-kville]

Thanks for the replies. The laptop behaved itself over the weekend. Definitely will be upgrading after the new year. Hopefully I can manage to salvage this one for something.

[Neto]

I would agree with most of what the others have already said here.
One, the box stores stock cheap inferior products. [I replaced the power supply (PSU) in an HP desktop computer some years ago, and was quite surprised that they had used a molex (4 wire) to SATA (5 wire) adapter to power the hard disk drive (HDD). Yes, I know that that 5th wire goes back to the same place in the PSU as one of the others, but the engineers are not so stupid that they put in an extra wire just for anyhow.]
Two, heat is a killer for electronics. And laptops are terribly inferior in terms of ventilation. With everything packed in that small thin case, there is very little air movement. Then you have the whole "lap" business. A lot of people DO actually set their LAPtop on top of their lap. Those little rubber feet on the bottom? They do nothing to provide any space underneath for air circulation. And a laptop on the bed?! Help the poor and the needy!
Three, all the "bloatware". The branded computers have had this problem for a long time, and now with Microsoft getting into the act big time with Windows 10, it's a pretty much helpless situation (my opinion). But certainly, before tossing it, look up the drivers download page on the laptop's manufacturer's site,and download and install only what you need after a fresh Windows installation. (For instance, if you or your congregation doesn't approve of sound & video, don't even install it.)
Now in respect to HDDs vs solid state drives (SSD), I have a bit different perspective. Even the major SSD manufacturers will advise, if possible, having both - the SSD dedicated for the operating system (OS) and program installations, and then with an HDD designated as the location for your My Documents and Public Documents folders. This makes use of the SSD's much greater speed, but also the HDD's longer lifespan. There will be some controversy here, but the deal is that SSDs do not survive as many Write-rewrite cycles as do HDDs. (This is where you create a file, write it to the disk, then later delete it, and write something else in the same space on the drive.) This is why, even though you may never need a 1TB (same as 1,000 GB) drive, a 1TB SSD will theoretically last twice as long as a 500 GB SSD. And it is also why, IF you install an SSD as the primary drive, you are advised to TURN OFF the Windows default function called Defragmentation or Optimization. (What that process does is to temporarily write all of the files which are broken up to the end of the drive, then rewrite them back to the beginning of the drive.) The larger capacity SSD drive will only require this process half as often as one half its size. I have built hundreds of systems, mostly with HDDs, and while I have seen a fair number of HDD failures, and only 1 SSD failure, an HDD failure is almost always a progressive affair, where you start to see little glitches which alert you to the fact that the drive is degrading, where as at least with the 1 SSD failure I have worked with, the customer told me that there were no warning signs at all, it was just sudden and total failure, and NOTHING could be retrieved from the failed drive. In contrast, if caught soon enough after the signs of impending HDD failure began to show, an image can almost always be retrieved from the failing drive. (This means that all of your own programs, files, printer installations, your custom settings, EVERYTHING will be exactly as it was before the drive replacement.) This is all not a big deal if you use a good backup program, such as Acronis True Image (and yes, there are some things I REALLY do not like about that program.), one which backs up not only your documents and other files, but the entire drive, with all of the settings, program installations, etc., because you can just use the backup software to write the drive image back to a new drive. (One caveat in this respect - when writing an image to or cloning to an SSD, it MUST be as large as, or larger than the source drive.)
(But, as I said, some will disagree with some of what I've said here. As Max says "Your Mileage May Vary".)

[Neto]

I double posted, so deleted it.

That message came up saying that 'someone else just posted a response', and I went ahead & told it to post it right away anyway. Turns out the "other person" was apparently me. I don't know why that happens, but it's not the first time.

[ken_sylvania]

I double posted, so deleted it.

That message came up saying that 'someone else just posted a response', and I went ahead & told it to post it right away anyway. Turns out the "other person" was apparently me. I don't know why that happens, but it's not the first time.

I think it has something to do with the two hard drives on your computer. The HDD drive runs just a bit slower than the SSD, causing the "Submit" command to go out the second time after a millisecond delay.

[Neto]

I double posted, so deleted it.

That message came up saying that 'someone else just posted a response', and I went ahead & told it to post it right away anyway. Turns out the "other person" was apparently me. I don't know why that happens, but it's not the first time.

I think it has something to do with the two hard drives on your computer. The HDD drive runs just a bit slower than the SSD, causing the "Submit" command to go out the second time after a millisecond delay.

Only I don't have an SSD on this one. I DO still have two IDE HDDs mounted in the case, but I think I've disconnected them some time back. (I built this computer for my office use out of parts I had laying around from customer upgrades, etc. The motherboard was one that took a lightening strike & burned out the networking. Happened under warranty, and while that sort of thing isn't really covered, I replaced it free of charge anyway. Had a network card form some place, and put that in, and have been using it for quite a few years. It's all pretty old hardware now.)

[ken_sylvania]

I double posted, so deleted it.

That message came up saying that 'someone else just posted a response', and I went ahead & told it to post it right away anyway. Turns out the "other person" was apparently me. I don't know why that happens, but it's not the first time.

I think it has something to do with the two hard drives on your computer. The HDD drive runs just a bit slower than the SSD, causing the "Submit" command to go out the second time after a millisecond delay.

Only I don't have an SSD on this one. I DO still have two IDE HDDs mounted in the case, but I think I've disconnected them some time back. (I built this computer for my office use out of parts I had laying around from customer upgrades, etc. The motherboard was one that took a lightening strike & burned out the networking. Happened under warranty, and while that sort of thing isn't really covered, I replaced it free of charge anyway. Had a network card form some place, and put that in, and have been using it for quite a few years. It's all pretty old hardware now.)

Well, I officially have some spare laptop parts laying around now too. My HP Spectre has given up the spectre. For about two days it was running painfully slow and now it will not even try to boot up. I'm assuming a power supply issue of some type as the power light doesn't come on at all, but I'm not excited about just throwing parts at it to try to figure out the issue. It is almost five years old....

[steve-in-kville]

I think after reading all this, I'm going back to Dell. I got almost ten years out of that one.

[mike]

I think after reading all this, I'm going back to Dell. I got almost ten years out of that one.

I buy almost exclusively Dell PCs and laptops for my business - refurbished off-lease business computers from https://www.dellrefurbished.com/. The important things to watch for on the site are coupon codes which typically run up to 40 or even 50% off, and also the fact that many of the units don't have Windows 10. But you can typically get good business quality PCs and laptops for a couple hundred dollars or so. And they come with exactly none of the bloatware that you get with consumer PCs.