Question How long has your computer lasted before needing repairs?

You might still be able to recover some stuff, it might take a lot of work though. When you go to get new hard drives steer clear of Hitachi and/or refurbished ones, since they will fail more quickly, I had one that was a refurbished Hitachi, luckily I was able to replace it before it died, that 500GB was full and showing signs of failure, so it had to go.

 

My first laptop was a Toshiba Satellite. I got it 6 years ago (I guess you could say I sort of "won" it - got it for free just for answering a trivia question on Toshiba's Twitter), and it went 4 years before needing to have the dust cleaned out of it and the screen replaced after the first one started dying out. Still works pretty good to this day, for its age.

In comparison, I got an HP Envy just a year ago, and it had all sorts of major hardware problems. Six months in, the hard drive died on me, so I had to send it out for a new HDD; and then a month ago the GPU started glitching up, and the Best Buy Geek Squad decided that I should just exchange the lemon-of-a-laptop for a new comparable model, since it was just barely still under warranty at the time.

I swapped out the HP Envy-Of-The-Most-Unreliable-Laptops-Ever for an ASUS Q504U, and in the first month using it, it works good so far. ASUS and Toshiba have had better reputations for laptop quality in recent years in comparison to HP, and both my friends and the Geek Squad have recommended ASUS over HP...

 

My laptop had a critical hard drive failure in under a year, thankfully warranty worked.

 

My current gaming desktop was built at the end of 2012 and is still going strong. I can't recall it ever having problems or needing parts replaced, except for maybe when I accidentally broke one of the USB ports.

Before that I had a Sony Vaio laptop that lasted through two and a half years of college, until its casing started coming apart and it was being held together with duct tape. One day it just crapped out for good.

 

I mean, my desktop is probably almost 15 years old by now, the only time it really broke was around 2003 when some outages destroyed the power supply.
Unless replacing old parts with new ones count as repair.
But it still has the same case, old classic white and bulky.
Not the same screen, i still have it but i prefer my 34 inch one.

My laptop on the other hand... i never use it for anything unless i'm traveling.
No problems, but it just sits there collecting dust.
Also both of my computers are meant for extreme gaming or serious graphic design, gotta push those fps to the limit bro.

 

My old laptop lasted 4 years before it broke down, due to a virus from a bad download. Only needed to backup the harddrive and it is still going strong.

 

My 2012 Computer lasted almost 5 years until a few months ago..

My PSU exploded and shortly after the hard drive failed, I realised it was time to refresh my computer with newer parts, it served me well!

 

It's not a whole computer, but I have a harddrive that's been working flawlessly for 14 years and counting. I use it entirely for storing cooking recipes because I expect it to fail every second now, and loosing cooking recipes is not the end of the world since I have all of them printed out.

 

My laptop i used to play Freelancer on, and quite impressively, Red Faction: Guerrilla.
All was well until one day it decided that there was no OS installed. I didn't bother as we went through 3 generations of PCs by then.
2006-2014.

I also used a laptop made around 1998 intermittently until at least 2009.