A slow laptop is usually not a worn-out laptop. In our workshop the overwhelming majority of "beyond help" machines are simply clogged with startup software, choked with dust, and fitted with a mechanical hard drive that was the bottleneck from the day it was sold.
That said, some machines genuinely are finished. Here is how we decide, and we apply the same test whether or not it produces a sale for us.
Usually worth repairing
- It still has a mechanical hard drive. An SSD is the single most dramatic upgrade available. Boot times routinely fall from minutes to seconds.
- It has 8GB of memory or less and a free slot. Memory is inexpensive and transforms multitasking.
- It is hot and loud. That is dust and dried thermal paste, not old age. A thermal service is cheap and restores performance that thermal throttling was stealing.
- A cracked screen on an otherwise good machine. Screens are replaceable and usually cost a fraction of the laptop’s remaining value.
- The battery dies quickly. Batteries are consumable parts, not the end of a machine’s life.
Usually not worth repairing
- The mainboard has failed on a machine over five years old. Board-level repair often approaches the cost of a better second-hand replacement.
- Liquid damage across multiple components. Sometimes economic, frequently not. We assess first and tell you honestly.
- The processor cannot handle your actual work. No upgrade fixes an underpowered processor. If a machine was slow when new, it will stay slow.
- Soldered memory at 4GB. Nothing can be done, and 4GB is no longer sufficient for a browser and a video call.
- Repairs would exceed roughly half the cost of replacement. That is our own rule of thumb, and we apply it to our own quotes.
A real example
A bookkeeper in Trenton was told by a retailer that her six-year-old laptop was finished and pushed towards a full replacement plus paid data migration. Her processor was entirely adequate for bookkeeping and email; the problem was a mechanical drive and six years of dust. Our SSD and memory upgrade programme at $2,499 — which includes 1TB of storage, a memory upgrade, a full thermal service, system cloning, benchmarking and a three-year warranty — reduced boot time from three minutes fifty seconds to fourteen seconds.
It now starts faster than a new machine, all her data survived untouched, and the fitted parts are warranted for three years. That is not unusual — it is the typical outcome for a laptop of that age and specification.