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I need to know a list of how many percentage of all components break within a year.
For example I would need to know how many percent of all netbook RAM is calculated to break within a year?
This is a lot to ask, I know. But I really do need to know some facts on what to except to break when you have a lot of netbooks. Would be glad if someone had hard facts that could be backed up with resources.
Only netbooks are considered.
Oskar Kjellin
Posted 2010-06-07T17:14:17.497
Reputation: 257
3
Netbooks are identical to laptops in this sense: their manufacturers consider failure information to be proprietary, and won't release it. So actual, industry-wide, figures are effectively unobtainable.
In a general sense, however, you're more likely to have a hard drive or a fan fail than to have a solid-state component like RAM fail. Netbooks, like laptops, are subject to a wide variety of vibration damage due to their mobile nature. Screens will be cracked, machines will be dropped.
If you're thinking of deploying netbooks en masse I'd suggest getting the maximum warranty on each one and sending them back whenever they have an error, and making it the manufacturers problem. When the warranty expires, throw the dead ones away. Where I work, we've been doing that with laptops for years, and it's really streamlined the whole process...Maintaining mobile computers is such a huge p.i.t.a, that it's far more economical just to have a few dozen spares lying around, than to have a bunch of guys whose sole job is to try and fix broken ones.
Satanicpuppy
Posted 2010-06-07T17:14:17.497
Reputation: 6 169
Netbooks break easier, faster. For example my ThinkPad would break a netbook in half :) ... So yeah.. netbook is a netbook. Something what people do NOT need, but buy. Like tablets and so on. Just an accessory, not a necessary stuff. – Apache – 2010-06-07T18:36:24.583
Thank you for your answer. But what is it based on? For example in my experience(which is a lot) RAM breaks rather often, and you state that it doesn't? I spoke to some people working with fixing computers and they all suggested RAM and HDD as the main thing. I guess I will have to take in account a lot of cracked screens etc. Warranty is unfortunately not a possibility here for several reasons. – Oskar Kjellin – 2010-06-07T19:41:27.110
@kurresmack: Based on anecdotal evidence, just like your's ;) Still we have more than 200 laptops in my work environment, and I've never had to replace RAM, so it's pretty deep anecdotal evidence. A good 80% of the problems we have are hdd related, and most of the others are catastrophic damage situations. Dropped, run over, spilled on, etc. – Satanicpuppy – 2010-06-07T20:16:06.260
@Satanicpuppy Thanks! This is just what I was looking for, people who work with this and can give their input. Personally I would go with more ram breakage, what RAM do you have? From what I've learned and as you said, most of the damage is HDD. I will review the calculated number of user-caused damages (drop etc) which will have their own special repair, thanks for the heads up. – Oskar Kjellin – 2010-06-07T20:33:20.503
@kurresmack: One of the peculiarities of my workplace is that about half of the workers take their gear out into the field, where physical trauma is more common. The other half tend to stay in the building with its extremely high-grade electrical system, so we don't have motherboard/power supply/ram failures very often (those tend to be power surge related). If your area is rich in electrical storms, you might have more of that sort of problem. – Satanicpuppy – 2010-06-07T20:51:32.450
@satanicpuppy Yes, thanks for that. But as these are netbooks they are very likely to be carried arround and dropped. You say you did not have a single RAM failure, how many HDD do you guess you have in 2 years? – Oskar Kjellin – 2010-06-08T16:21:13.353
@kurresmack: 8? Something like that. – Satanicpuppy – 2010-06-08T18:16:54.167
@satanicpuppy Thanks, I'll mark this as answered now :) – Oskar Kjellin – 2010-06-08T20:01:14.640
rma? did you meant return merchandise authorization or maybe just ram?
– whitequark – 2010-06-07T17:18:29.500@Whitequark I meant RMA (or simply computer repair) – Oskar Kjellin – 2010-06-07T17:26:05.987
2This would be very difficult to answer. There are too many key components (and key component manufacturers) to get a handle on this. You would be better off asking the individual companies who make the end product themselves (if they would even be remotely interested in releasing that information). – Michael Todd – 2010-06-07T17:32:17.407
@Michael: I have a feeling that if you asked the company they would say 50 years or something xD – Wuffers – 2010-06-07T18:01:04.937
@Michael Yeah, I asked the company but ofcourse they do not wan't to release this information and risk making themselves look bad. What I am looking for is more of a guideline in how many percentage. It is so hard to get an idea if you do not keep count etc – Oskar Kjellin – 2010-06-07T19:39:01.077
@kurresmack: we have a [repair] tag; please don't create unnecessary tags if an existing tag will suffice. – quack quixote – 2010-06-07T19:58:46.210
@quack thanks, did not know of that tag as I am new to superuser. For me RMA was more natural, that's why I chose it – Oskar Kjellin – 2010-06-07T20:01:59.947
@kurresmack: to me RMA just means "return to retailer", and doesn't imply repairing anything. :) i usually use the tag input box as a sort of search -- check the autocomplete options to see if there's something close to what you're looking for, and try synonyms. anyway, not a huge deal; we can always retag later if necessary. – quack quixote – 2010-06-07T20:16:46.303