Short life time for my cheap laptop

I bought this laptop on the photo above two years ago. To me, that is a very new laptop.

I bought it mainly for a specific purpose where I need very little space on hard drive as well as memory size and processor. Windows 10 was needed.

Therefore I selected this one, with performance good enough for my need. But I was not aware of one thing: how much additional space on hard drive that was needed for the major Windows updates.

Already at the beginning, I had problem with a major software update, but I managed that one and other so far. Now in March 2018 I need to do another major upgrade: My version of Windows 10 will not be supported after 10 April. I have spent many hours already to update, including trying to upgrade with support of an external drive during upgrade. So far I have failed. I am not computer expert, but pretty good at computers. I have not given up fully yet, I will try more. In best case, it will only take me many hours to update. But not unlikely, this computer will within two years of purchase be too old to be updated in a way so it is use supported software. Only because the hard drive has too little capacity.

IC circuits and everything else to make a computer requires many chemicals to manufacture them. And a lot of energy to make the part. Even if computer will be recycled, it will be a lot of wasted resources including energy. Not at least the production is a big contributor to the environmental impact when a LCA (Life cycle assessment) is done.

I am not an expert of LCAs of computers, but for all I know from general electronics knowledge and what I read in LCA reports, I am confident there is indeed an environmental impact. For example, those reports can be read as reference:

• "Green Electronics? - An LCA Based Study of Eco-labeling of Laptop Computers", by Jasmin St-Laurent, Daniel Hedin*, Caspar Honée, Morgan Fröling at Mid Sweden University, Östersund, Sweden.
• "Life Cycle Assessment of a Laptop Computer and its Contribution to Greenhouse Gas Emissions", by Anh Hoang, Weili Tseng, Shekar Viswanathan and Howard Evans at School of Engineering and Technology National University, San Diego, USA

It is pity that computers are manufactured and sold with so short product life time.

Henrik Hemrin

27 March 2018

This article is also published on LinkedIn.