My kingston hyperX 3K SSD from 2013 I got after Wendell and Logan were raving about them is still at 94% health after just one firmware bug fix. Literally just keeps going
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Any manufacturers and/or models where there is a lower failure rate?
I am only an end consumer but heard ājust buy a Lenovo. Preferably a T-Series modelā more than once.
Does that still hold true, or just as good/bad as everything else?
Business class machines are typically built much better than consumer junk. When something does break on a T-series out of warranty, you can download the full service manual and easily source the replacement components you need.
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Hopefully they got the battery controller sorted out.
For about 6 years they die and always show a discharged battery, even with new cells and are left unable to boot
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FWIW as an anecdote, our large OEM buys have converged to Lenovo. Thatās been primarily motivated by Dell and HP charging substantially more up front (sometimes easily double for the same thing) but so far we havenāt seen major failures come through. You never know if a model you bought a bunch of a couple years ago is going to blow up in another six months, though. In the desktops Iāve taken a look at Lenovoās current gen hardware is cheap, occasionally stupid cheap, but not as bad as the most recent Dell and HP iterations we have. White boxing easily nets better desktop parts at lower cost but then you have to pick up the labor for BOM selection, assembly, and testing. Which costs us at least a few hundred US$/ā¬ per machine, so we mostly keep that for higher spec builds where workloads are particularly performance sensitive.
Personally, Iāve used a series of ThinkPad Ts over the years. Build qualityās above average and software issues have generally been minor but thereās an element of luck there in having avoided certain machine types that have had major problems. Iām not sure Iād say Iāve continued buying T series because itās anything magical, more that nothing else appears obviously more reliable or cost advantaged enough to be worth a reliability drop.
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Also an anecdote: I recently started working at a company with some 500 employees, and the current laptop fleet is Lenovo X1ās. We have 3rd-gen, 5th-gen, and 7th-gen machines around. While of the 3rd-gens not many are left, they work just fine. The 5th-gens also have more cosmetic than real defects. On the 7th-gens we have been seeing a higher than usual rate of defects, mostly to do with the Thunderbolt ports.
Of the T-series I can only report singular experiences: in 2015 I started a new job, and got a (then brand-new) T440s; it worked well enough for 3 years until the service plan ran out, then it was replaced with an (also then brand-new) T480s. That one developed an issue with the Thunderbolt port reporting an error that could never be solved but it charged, and served the monitors, so I just ignored it until I changed jobs. Among my colleagues these models were also perceived as mostly reliable.
Based on this perception I recently acquired a used T495s with Ryzen 7; it seems to be working just fine.
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That generation of Thinkpad shipped with bugged Thunderbolt controller firmware. IIRC the controller constantly wrote excessive amounts of diagnostic log data and burned through the onboard flash memory life. Intel eventually released a firmware update that fixed the problem, but only if you caught it before the flash memory died.
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Hi! New to the forum, but wanted to chime in!
My company went HP again recently (we bounce HP and Dell to āsave moneyā in buyouts?) and similar issues.
- Lots of staff are having audio driver issues, that was the start. Iāve seen HP audio driver issues for years so that didnāt surprise me much.
- Now myself and others, after recent HP updates, are having display out issues over USB-C and Thunderbolt, any form of docking is a nightmare. USB still works fine, but we have to connect the display directly. It limits us to one additional monitor, which I can live with, but many on my team canāt.
- In the 10,000s of Chromebooks Iāve managed, repaired, or ordered, the HP and Acer units gave me the most issues over the years. Dell was okay, Lenovo a bit better when the keyboard didnāt short the motherboard, Samsung was usually* best.
Be it HPās fault or not, itās sad to see all these brands dumping these on the market and hoping enough people āmake it workā that they still make profit in the long run. Seems like a failing model to me, but somehow they keep it up all the same.
Anecdotally, since single units, I have a personal P series Thinkpad and decent-spec Latitude and both are solid, so it may just be that the SKUs we see shoved in businesses are the issues. Like the one guy mentioned, Iād rather a 2k laptop with a better warranty/lifespan than a 1k laptop that kicks the bucket in half the time.
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I canāt say it will work for sure, but for HP USB-C display out issues thereās a couple of things to try. Shut the machine down. Then hold the power button for 30+ seconds. This is supposed to reset the controllers. This is straight from HP. I have had limited success. If that doesnāt work you can go the next level. Remove the bottom cover. Disconnect the main battery and the coin cell Bios battery. Now hold the power button for a 10+ seconds to drain any remaining flea power. reassemble and try again. I maybe just got lucky, but was able to fix a few this way recently.
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On a separate note I had 2 more HP G9 laptops fail today. One I was able to recover and so far is working fine. The other I tried to recover. It came up and survived updates, but bricked and failed again within an hour. Now when anyone comes to me with no power/no post condition I ask if itās a G9.
Notes from my high school
Probably not what you are looking for but this might be of some use for somebody
My old high school/city bougth dell latitude 3410 laptops for all of the students, and after 2-3 years, there were over 200 laptops sent out for recycling out of a few thousand. Almost of those were āuser induced damageā, some had just issues with a part and the laptops were out of warranty so they would just get a new unit instead. I know this happened for windows 10 issues as well, because there is no staff to fix these.
Suprisingly, we managed to get about 70 laptops (out of our batch of around 100) back to circulation with the rest getting stripped for parts with a team of around 10 people, from which we had 2 professionals onsite to help with the harder parts.
The biggest problem from what I saw were the plastic parts breakingā¦
And also sometimes the internal component fasterners glued to the external shell came off
As far as I can tell, the problems above are not as common anymore now that students get lenovo thinkpads for their computersā¦
Strange compared to my 2014 latitude.
Also, my current probook 455 G7 that I bought new had a battery die in less than a quearter after the purchase. Fun for me trying to migrate off it for a few weeks for maintenance. Apart from that, it has been pretty solid-
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