What is the average life-expectancy of an office Desktop...?

Question

...that is used 5 days a week, 9 hours a day? I ask because lately we have been having a spate of hard-disk errors on PCs in our office and they all seem to be around the same age.

Answer 1

the average life exectancy of most hard drives is measured in start stop cycles.
but normally it is an average of one to three years under the time frame you are detailing.
if you want reliable drives then use seagate drives.
i can not recall if it is 50,000 or 500,000 start stop cycles before failure or errors.
but i do know that if you are using budget westerndigital drives then the drives are likely to fail within 12 months under the hours you specify.

i have a system up and in use 24/7 as a family mail server, and FTP server. and that has never had a problem yet.

as a general rule of thumb your company should be looking to replace computer hardware after three years on average as this is when computer components tend to start failing at which point it is normally cheaper to buy new than replace failing components.
your IT department should already have budgeted for the replacement of your hardware when the time comes.
however if your company use dell or acer systems then the chances are your systems are failing after less than 18months use not the standard of around three years.

however if it is just the hard drives failing in the systems then i'd go to http://www.dabs.com and buy a load of high capacity drives (enough for at least two drives per system (including an external housing and drive for the housing to back up the system (corporate data)should the corporate server fail)))

Answer 2

The life of a computer may well be 10 to 20 years. However the utility of a computer may be much shorter. As the power of computers increases each year, so do the demands of software programs and operating systems. Think about the hardware demands of various operating systems from Microsoft. DOS could be run on a 1 MHZ CPU with less than 640 KB RAM. Windows 98 ran on 32 MB, XP needed a minimum of 128 MB, Vista needs 512 MB and an 800 MHz CPU to begin to run effectively. The old DOS computers still run, the are just slow and will not run the newer programs, nor will they run most new hardware (including current memory chips). Business life of a computer is 2 to 4 years. PC magazine has the following sage advise on upgrading vs replacing: Often upgrading the system you have can prove to be a headache, and it may not be worth the effort. We like to operate by the "PC Magazine Rule of Four," which goes like this: If you find yourself with a desktop that is four years old or more, or you're going to replace four or more components, it's time to get a new system. There is a similar timetable involved when you are dealing with laptops. After about a year you should look into upgrading your RAM if you are not at 1GB already. Two years in, your battery should be starting to give out, and if you need a new hard drive, it's time to replace the laptop.

Answer 3

my desktop is left on 24hrs a day 7 days a week but the normal life of a desktop is around 4/5 years then that is when things start to fail!!

Answer 4

I used to haul the old ones that the government surplussed... most still worked and were around 4 years old when they got rid of them... I'd have to say about 5 years for the average commercial PC used daily and kept on 24/7 !

Answer 5

Well if you dont get so annoyed with it that you wanna just throw the damn thing across the room and remove all the last reminants of its chip set because it came up with the dreaded BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH *which is just its way of saying 'great now look what u made me do'!!* then they will run for yrs. mine is now 8 yrs old thou have done some upgrades.. but look after it well and it will be ur very annoying pal for life ;)

Answer 6

We have HPs that are 8 years old. We've hardly ever had a Mac last more than 4 years.

Answer 7

4 years, 252 days, 7 hours, 32 minutes, and 12.6 seconds, assuming that it is not a leap year.

If it is a leap year, take that number minus -0.32%

Answer 8

in hospital, NHS, there are many ancient computers still ticking away. always on, abused heavily, and exrremely slow, but still working. perhaps 4-5 years old atleast.

Answer 9

emachines 18 months by my experience.

Answer 10

THREE YEARS