Laptops can be fickle devices and can often crash at the shortest notice, leaving you with unsaved documents and ounces of frustration. Besides the obvious wear and tear such as broken screens, there are a variety of signs that indicate parts of your laptop are broken or not working as they should be.
If you’re losing patience with your current laptop and want to look at getting an upgrade, then we buy broken laptops for cash, which you can then put towards a more up-to-date model.
While some of these issues below can be repaired, it can often cost more than the laptop is worth and may be a sign that you need an upgrade.
Battery issues
All batteries in electronic devices deteriorate over time and the laptop you bought advertised as “12 hour battery life” may now be more like two hours maximum. At the extreme end of the scale, you may see a red “X” over the battery icon in your tool tray. This means that the battery is unable to charge and likely won’t operate when not plugged in.
Although it’s possible to replace the battery, it may be sealed into the device, which means you will have to send it to the manufacturer, which can be even more costly. In such cases, it’s better to cut your losses and opt for a newer, longer lasting model.
Blue screen of death
The ominous blue screen of death happens on windows operating systems and shows you have a major issue with your device. The computer usually takes this action when there is a high risk of serious issues such as a complete breakdown of your hard drive.
If you find yourself staring at a blue screen more often than once or twice, then this is usually a sign of an underlying issue and is unlikely to be fixed without great expense.
Rapid overheating
Your laptop’s cooling system is essential for keeping the core operating systems at steady temperatures. If you find your laptop becoming very hot, very quickly then this may be a sign that your cooling system has malfunctioned. This can cause irreparable damage to the internal components and may result in a complete hardware crash.
If you’ve tried using a cooling pad and even paid for repairs to no avail, then it may be time to cut your losses and upgrade before your laptop stops working completely.
Slower than usual
Finding your boot up time has doubled and applications are taking longer to load are common issues with older laptops. While this may not be the result of malware, there is always a possibility, which means your files and data may be at risk.
Another common cause of this is a full hard drive. Your hard drive space may be taken up by updates to software and applications, meaning your laptop simply doesn’t have enough room to operate smoothly. Upgrading to a laptop with minimum 500GB can help avoid these issues with hard drive overloading.