Should you repair a five-year-old laptop or replace it?
Five years isn't a death sentence. A failing motherboard is.
Usually worth repairing
- Slow because of a worn hard drive. An SSD upgrade is inexpensive and dramatic.
- Low memory you can expand.
- Battery, charging port, keyboard or screen on a machine that's otherwise fast.
Usually worth replacing
- Repair would cost more than roughly half the price of a comparable new machine.
- The processor is too old to run current Windows updates.
- Soldered parts have failed, such as the motherboard.
Questions I ask
- What do you use it for day to day?
- Does it still do that, just slowly, or not at all?
- Is your data backed up?
A $95 diagnostic answers this with facts, and it's applied to the repair if you go ahead. If replacing is better, I'll say so and help you move your files.
Related: Computer repair & upgrades