Why Your PC Will Eventually Die #Computers #Shorts

This article is a transcript of a video that you can watch by clicking the thumbnail below. Hence, certain statements may not make sense in this text form, and watching the video instead is recommended.

Transcript

A computer doesn’t work forever, but not all aging elements are obvious. We know how batteries gradually lose their ability to hold a charge for longer, or other physical components like the keyboard, touchpad, palmrest, or rubber feet start to show some age.

What most of us do not realize though, are things that take a little longer to age, those that wouldn’t even be near the top of the list of potential issues for a machine that hasn’t been designed to be working for more than a couple of years.

For the machines that do survive long enough, there are a few deteriorating elements I’ve realized and learned about:

1. The storage drives that we use, be it an NVMe drive, a SATA drive, or even a mechanical spinning hard-drive, all have telemetry running behind the scenes. Some of these include the amount of data that has been read from or written to the drive, the number of times the machine equipped with the drive has been restarted, either gracefully or otherwise, and much more. There is software available that will help you read that data and estimate the remaining health of the drive, which you’d want to be as high as possible.
2. Our screens age as well, in a variety of ways. The older ones use to show a change in color temperature, turning more and more yellow as they age, others develop burn spots or bright spots, and these aren’t the only issues out there.
3. Like all machines, your computer needs to fight with generated heat, which is almost always dependent on how hard the machine is working. The thermal paste that helps cool down the CPU, GPU, and other such elements starts to become less and less efficient with age, leading to overheating and indirectly causing permanent damage to other components.
4. One of the serious issues due to overheating is the separation of electrical contacts between components. This used to be a design issue with certain models in the past, but technically, this could happen to any modern computer as well.

So, I’m sorry to have spoiled it for at least some of the viewers of this video, but if your OCD is as strong as mine, you may be having a slight difficulty every time you push that power ON button, because literally every single action you perform a task on your computer, that could potentially push your beloved computing companion closer to a total failure.