After nearly four years of constant, brutal use, it seems like my laptop is reaching the end of its life. The touchpad is difficult to use and the buttons are heavily worn. Several of the keys have to be pressed just right on the keyboard. The webcam is broken. Two power adaptors no longer work, and the current one can only charge or run the laptop, but not both simultaneously. One USB port is damaged. The optical drive sometimes disconnects itself.

I fixed most of the problems by taking the mouse, keyboard, sound, and monitor external. All of that was fine and dandy until the internal backlight decided to quit working. I thought I'd pick up a netbook to take with me and leave the laptop at home on the monitor. Well, forces that be are making the VGA port harder and harder to use, as the colors are going crazy on my monitors--all of my monitors.

If it dies, the only thing I'll have left is the S-Video port, with runs at about 640x480 at the highest without looking like crap. It's either that or remote connection, which is too slow for everyday use.

Whoa. Cat stop being so mean to your computers.
That's actually pretty insane at how many things have/are broken. I've had mine for almost a year and a half and the only thing wrong with it is... hm... I don't think there are any major problems with mine. Maybe give it a kick and tell it not to die.
You going to get a new laptop by any chance?

I'm going to be trying to get a desktop, as I have a netbook for school and other portable purposes. This laptop has gotten an average of about 7 hours of usage every single day since April 21, 2007, the day before Diamond and Pearl were released in North America.

It's sort of sad how even though you can usually preserve the hardware of technology for so long a time, eventually everything goes kaput and you can't revive something that you've been using for so long.

As I have said before that really all easy to fix.

Powerjack $20

CCFL(backlight) $10-30
or
CCFLInverter $20 < more likely


As for the track-pad alcohol usual clears that up. On the plug inside

As for you display getting messed up thats cause by the heatsync screws backing out/ past getting old.

As for the webcam you sol with that in the 3 hp laptops i have taken apart the cam is dead or accely stops the pc from booting


My laptop is a lot older that yours and its still running fine.


EDIT:
i beg to differ.

How did your laptop become like this? Is it because of excessive usage, or is it due to some accidents (falling on the ground, etc.)?

I've always preferred desktops over laptops, by the way. They generally have better specifications, they don't turn off if they're not charged, and the keyboard is less awkward to use. Plus, there's a reduced risk of desktops falling off because they are not portable (unlike laptops).

What are your laptop specs?

Wow, Cat, you need to take better care of your laptop. I have a 6 year old laptop that still works fine for the most part, I can't imagine what you've done to yours!

Am I the only one that thinks that it's not unusual that Cat's laptop isn't working after four years?

7 hours daily for 365 days multiplied by 4 years is 10,220 hours, which is ~425 days, or 1.16 YEARS of use, which, in my opinion, is waay over the expected lifespan of a portable computer.

I'm just scared for the netbook... O.o



~Anthony

Whatever possible remedies still exist, I can't understand why you would want to keep in running anymore... just pull the plug.

Damn, that's pretty bad. If you're going to get a new computer, though, get one with a VT-x enabled processor and at least 4 GB of DDR3 RAM. This way, that entire project I went on about last year with you might finally come to fruition. or just get a mac that works too

But if you're trying to squeeze it out of the last drops of it's use, I hear that the remote desktop in Win7 is faster than in Vista and XP, so you could feasibly get some use out of it from your netbook. Otherwise, I dunno. Why not turn it into a server or put it out of it's misery?