Expert Consulted: Adrian Gardiner. I’m drawing on my own 30 years of experience in the IT industry to write this article, having maintained, repaired and upgraded many computers, including laptops for my customers.
After spending our money on an expensive gaming laptop, of course we want it to last as long as possible. So, how long do gaming laptops last?
The life of a gaming laptop is related to the quality of the hardware components used and the care it’s given during it’s life. Buy the highest specification you can, in particular with the best GPU, from a well respected brand with a good warranty, extended if possible. Regularly clean it by removing dust build up and upgrade if required.
In the rest of this article, I go into more detail on how you can get the very best life out of your gaming laptop.
How Long Do Gaming Laptops Last? The key steps you need to know.
The following sections cover the important steps to extending your laptops usable life.
Get The Best Specification
To make sure that your laptop will be able to play the best games at the highest or near to best game settings means ensuring that you choose the best specification you possibly can within your available budget.
When choosing your gaming laptop, the most important components to consider, in order of importance are:
- Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) – this controls what you see on the screen
- Processor (CPU) – the heart of your laptop
- Memory (RAM) – both amount of RAM and speed are important
- Storage – M.2 NVMe is currently the best
Unlike a desktop PC you can’t easily upgrade key components. The first two items, GPU and CPU are not going to be upgradable so it’s important to get the very best you can at the outset.
Again, get the best RAM (16 GB minimum) and Storage (1 – 2 TB minimum) you can.
However, RAM and Storage can usually be upgraded at a later stage if required unless you’re unlucky enough to have a laptop with soldered (non-removable) RAM and Storage (check before buying and avoid).
Keep It Cool
Cooling is the single most important factor to consider if you want to improve the life of your Gaming Laptop.
Packing so much performance in to a portable device means cooling is key and can easily be affected by a range of factors, most of which are fortunately within our control.
What can cause overheating?
The following areas can all affect the cooling capabilities of your laptop.
Dust
Inevitably, dust will build up over time, especially if you have pets or operate the laptop on top of soft furnishings or in a dusty environment.
It doesn’t take much at all to block the intake and exhaust ports on a laptop. I spend a lot of time cleaning out laptops to remove all the dust.
I also find that excessive dust build up can cause premature cooling fan failure so dust build up needs to be handled quickly.
The laptop is best used if possible on a hard surface like a table, preferably raised a bit with space underneath to improve cooling where it’s needed most.
You can also use a specially designed cooling pad.
Thermal Paste
The thermal paste applied to processors at the factory is not always of the best quality and it’s not unusual for this to dry out sooner than expected.
I would not usually expect to have to even think about thermal paste issues for many years.
However, if you are constantly seeing high temperatures and performance throttling by the laptop (to protect itself from damage due to overheating) then applying fresh paste is something you should consider, especially if dust is not the culprit.
It’s worth noting that applying fresh thermal paste is not a job for the faint hearted if you’ve never done it before. I would recommend using your local IT shop to carry out such work.
Lengthy Gaming Sessions
Regular, extended high intensity gaming can occasionally put a strain on your laptops ability to keep itself cool, especially if the room itself is quite warm, like in Summer for example.
To counter this you can try tweaking your game settings down a tad to give your laptop a break – you’ll probably not notice the difference as much as you think when gaming.
General Laptop Care
There are a range of other laptop care issues that you can tackle to help with the life of your laptop.
Handle It Gently
Your laptop might seem quite tough but don’t be deceived as they’re more delicate than you might think.
Here are a list of problems I’ve seen with laptops over the years, some of which have often resulted in the laptops demise that you need to be aware of.
Accidental Damage to Laptops
I’ve had to deal with so many laptops that have been stepped on, driven over! or dropped on to hard surfaces. None of these situations are good, often resulting in damage that’s not worth repairing.
Often laptops are just handled too roughly, grabbing the screen from the corners which stresses the hinges and can result in screen damage.
Always open by holding the centre of the lid / display with one hand whilst holding down the base with your other hand.
Be careful with the power socket on your laptop – this area is very vulnerable to having the power cable accidentally yanked at an awkward angle while plugged in. Over time this will damage the socket, requiring repair / replacement.
Spillages and Food
Laptops really don’t go well together with drink and food. Many drinks, particularly fizzy ones dry in to a sticky mess meaning a new keyboard at the very least if you’re lucky.
Food and other detritus stuck on and between the keys is just plain awful and not pleasant to deal with.
Best to keep food and drink well away from your precious laptop if you can withstand the temptations.
Cleaning Your Laptop
I recommend you regularly keep your laptop as clean as you can. It will thank you with better performance and reliability.
Exterior
To clean the exterior, use a very slightly damp microfiber cloth to wipe the case cover clean. You can also use the same cloth to very gently clean each of the keyboard keys in turn if they need it.
Whatever you do, don’t squeeze any liquid out of the cloth on to the keyboard or any other part of the laptop.
Don’t wipe the whole keyboard in one go with the cloth or you’ll most likely rip keys completely off.
Interior
If your laptop has a noisy fan or doesn’t run too well, there is a good chance it’s getting clogged up with dust and a good clean is needed.
Most laptops are definitely not meant to be user serviceable and would usually need an experienced technician to delve inside on your behalf.
However, what you can do is to purchase a compressed air can off somewhere like Amazon and direct air in to the laptop via the cooling fan on the base of your laptop so that gathered dust exits via the exhaust vent.
You can also try this in reverse just to make sure that you’ve removed as much dust as possible, especially if the first approach didn’t get rid of much.
There can be quite a lot of dust blowing around during this process so make sure you’re somewhere you can do this without inhaling the dust or causing a mess inside your home.
NOTE: Be very careful when directing air at the cooling fan – the compressed air can make the fan spin too fast and cause it damage.
I recommend holding the fan in position with a wooden toothpick for example, while blowing air in.
More Tips for Extending Laptop Life Expectancy
Here are a few more things that you can do to make your laptop last longer.
Extended Warranty
Laptops are one of the few devices that I would recommend taking the option of an extended warranty providing that the pricing is reasonable. Most faults / issues will happen outside the 1 year warranty after the laptop has had a lot of use.
The problem is that laptops use specially designed parts which are expensive and often difficult to replace – a warranty can prove invaluable if replacement items are needed.
Upgrade Your Laptop
Upgrades are a great way to affordably keep your laptop running well, including adding more RAM and Storage.
Remember to check and make sure your chosen laptop doesn’t have soldered (non-removable) RAM and Storage preventing you from upgrading in the future.
Installed game sizes will continue to grow in size and so your storage will need to be increased at some point to keep up.
Battery Life
Try to adopt good charging habits to extend the life of the battery as this is likely to be one of the first items to wear out.
Charge when the battery charge level drops to around 25% but charge it up to no higher than 85% if you can.
Just like your mobile phone, keeping the charger plugged too long will shorten the laptops battery life considerably.
Updates
Keep your laptop up to date with regular Windows updates. It doesn’t take long to fall behind and you’ll be missing out on a lot of performance and reliability related improvements.
Game makers will also be regularly updating their own game software to match changes with new Windows releases so it’s very important to keep Windows as current as possible.
Conclusion
Make sure you get a laptop with a great specification in the first place and you’ll have taken the most important step in making sure your laptop will have a long life.
Over time though, with constant changes in operating system software and new game specification requirements, your laptop will eventually start to struggle to keep up.
However, with regular cleaning, upgrading where possible and just generally taking the best possible care of your laptop you can expect it to give you many years of great, reliable service (8 to 10 years is not unusual). It may not be the fastest laptop it once was but it will still be useable.