I've been wanting to write a paper on PC/Laptop Hardware failure rates, and now two professors have agreed to help me publish a paper on the subject. I have at least 100 records of repairs done(Over the last two years) at this shop that I can eventually build metrics/statistics off of, and I think I can get this published (which would be good for my college career here). Any suggestions would be nice.
Little background: I've been doing repairs/IT work for a couple years. I noted a while ago that limited information on hardware failure rates exists at all, both public/independent.
I'm looking to write the best quality on the subject I can. It can be as extensive as I can go, so the more metrics we can provide, the better.
Here is what I'm thinking so far:
-Reasons machines are submitted to begin with (i.e. freezing, failure bootup, etc.) or common issues -Hardware Failure rates by component -Cause/effect relationships of hardware failure/repairs needed of any kind including: Age of hardware/software Obviously neglect (like water damage)
Thing is, I'm also wondering if anyone out there can provide some of the stats from their organizations (without providing private info, obviously) and with permission. I probably won't need anything but failure stats/repairs done over an annual period, this can be for repairs internally (within your organization) or externally (like for contracts, normal repairs, etc.).
Even brand / price of the products that are having issues. From my experience most cheaper HP and Toshiba laptops have the highest failure rate here. Usually AMD based APU's, almost all failures are from the motherboard.
This is good, I've noticed this too. My previous employer tried to avoid selling the consumer grade Best Buy stuffs, cause we would almost certainty have them back for repair in less than a year. Tried to stick with more business line laptops.
This is a good metric to include, but I'm not sure how i would do it, outside of a crazy amount of research done for each machine... Still, might be worth including this metric.
Do you need actually documentation if work done? At my job last year I replaced around 6 Western Digital Blue hard drives but I dint have the documentation for it since I'm not there anymore. I have other misc information I could provide as well, only problem is its non scientific or verifiable.
not sure if this will help, but whatever If you want some sources try out Louis Rossman (assuming you have not already heard of him) he does macbook repairs, and explains the repair process.
How laptops in my family died
tl;dr mechanical hard drives do not survive impact
abusive laptop owner For me multiple laptops have died or are breaking down. Generally from neglectful use. For example, we had a compaq laptop that suffered food damage (coffee and food getting stuck under the keyboarrd) and finally broke when it was dropped.
Later we upgraded to a HP pavilion laptop (suffered same damage as compaq), keyboard stopped functioning, display connection broke (white screen) display worked again after a couple months, battery does not hold any charge, and the laptop overheats. When the laptop overheats, the display becomes all white replacing the keyboard worked, but after reviving food damage it stopped working (probably can fix it but family has already upgraded to a desktop)
My personal machines One of my old Toshiba (apu) hard drive died when it experienced impact, after replacing the hard drive, it died again from heat.
I broke the hard drive in my Lenovo B575 after getting angry and taking my frustration out on the laptop, but then replaced the mechanical hard drive with a ssd
I'm looking to make the information as realistic as possible, so yes, I would need proof. I'm trying to figure a decent way to get this info without being nosy- like a summarized report. But even for me, that is a lot of work as normal places don't keep a record of specific jobs they've done, including mine. I basically took the last two years of repair receipts we kept in a filing cabinet and I'm going to build part of my stats from there. edit: If I could somehow get internal IT reports from bigger organizations, that would be amazing.
Sources for that one ^ can be found at the very bottom of the Forum post. They're in french, which is why I'm linking the translated version that was done on LTT :>
UPDATE: My brother in-law works for a major company that does SAP stuff, and said he may be able to get me some internal numbers on their hardware/IT help desk stuff for repairs. This combined information could prove very useful to the end goal.