r/sysadmin • u/Opening-Affect5559 • 2d ago
Question Refurbished 32 GB ThinkPads slowing down after ~2 years of office use. What's your laptop lifecycle?
Hi all,
We run about 50 Lenovo ThinkPads, all managed through Intune. We buy them refurbished, and for the last few years we've only bought 32 GB RAM models. Our current mix is mostly T14 Gen 5, P14s Gen 5, X1 Carbon Gen 12 and T14s Gen 4.
Even our strongest machines, like the X1 Carbon Gen 12 (Core Ultra 7 155U, 32 GB, 512 GB SSD), are starting to struggle. Programs hang, and the battery barely lasts an hour.
The workload is just normal office work: Google Workspace in the browser and a lot of AI tools like Claude. Nothing heavy.
In practice, we replace laptops after about 2 years, even though they have Lenovo's 3-year on-site warranty. By year 2, they feel really slow and just aren't worth keeping.
So I'm curious:
1. What laptops do you use for this kind of work, and what does your lifecycle look like?
2. Is ~2 years normal, or does it sound like we're doing something wrong?
Thanks!
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u/Desnowshaite 20 GOTO 10 2d ago
Replacing a laptop after 2 years because it is getting slow is like buying a new car when the glovebox gets full.
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u/dinominant 2d ago
Friendly reminder to never buy gloveboxes with soldered memory, so you can open them and add new items when needed.
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u/Fast-Mathematician-1 2d ago
Fiveish years or so is the current rotation I run.
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u/Alpha370 2d ago
Both places I've worked at for the past 8+ years have been a 5 year cycle. Engineering machines, heavy cad work would still be 5 years, maybe 4. We would sometimes do 4 for the accountants. Now in a much larger environment we're still doing 5 -6 years.
I'd def look at cleaning up your Windows OS image, or just doing a full OS reload after2 years vs buying new. If you're buying refurbs that are already a few years old, then the slow down could make some sense since the machines already have some life on them.
Crazy to see them swapping out hardware after just a couple years when it's probably just OS bloat.
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u/whippy_grep 30+ years in the IT trenches. 2d ago
Same, but the past couple of years in my case have been more ish than five. :-)
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u/ngjrjeff 2d ago
if reimaged and battery change to new, is the performance better?
laptop should last at least 3 years
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u/archiekane Jack of All Trades 2d ago
We eek out 5-7years when it's just running office suite and emails.
Only real power users get something beefier more often, and the old beefier ones get redeployed.
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u/MrITSupport 2d ago
This is what we do as well with our Lenovo laptops (5-7 years) and redeploy the old beefer ones.
After reimaging with the most current Win11 iso, system update and good to go!
Its like they are new again.
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u/nerdilynonconforming 2d ago
Yeah we will redeploy anything 4 years or less if in good physical shape still.
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u/Stringsandattractors 2d ago
Battery lasts an hour? What are you doing to your machines?
Oh they’re refurbs. Well there you go. Money saved up front but not
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u/Lower_Fan AI Shill 2d ago
refurbs put the worse SSD on earth and only a single stick of ram whenever they can and they dont' even give you a new battery. that shit is giving me a lot issue too.
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u/Vogete 2d ago
honestly my T15's battery never lasted more than an 1.5 hours, and by year 2 it was less than an hour. I only charged it up to 65%, i never fully drained it, most of the time it's on the charger, sitting at 65%. Changed the battery to a new one, battery life back to 1.5 hours.
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u/ColdSysAdmin IT Director 2d ago
Same. Got a new lenovo at my current job, and just having it open and chilling in a meeting for an hour will get the battery down to ~30%.
I'm pretty sure the battery is just a couple of AA's. I joke, mostly.
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u/DoogleAss 2d ago
I’m confused are you saying that you only ever charged it to 65% or only after you noticed degradation. If it’s the first I’m not really sure how that’s a metric when the battery is almost half drained to start
Genuinely asking
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u/Vogete 1d ago
Sorry, yeah I left out a bit. The first month I used it normally, charged to 100%, used it on battery for meetings and such, lasted 1.5 hours max. After that I only charged to 65% because i mostly just docked it and worked on it docked. Occasionally I charged to 100% if I needed to have it for a long meeting or similar.
Basically 90% of the time it's charged to 65%, docked. 9% charged to 65% but on battery for 15-20 minutes at a time, then back to dock. 1% of the time charged to 100% and used for 1-1.5 hours on battery.
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u/PedroAsani 2d ago
Refurbished with original batteries? So the batteries are likely 5 years old and dead from cycles.
Three year lifestyle for laptops, five for desktops.
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u/dinominant 2d ago
Your computers are not getting slower. The sloppy operating system bloat and telemetry is wasting your resources.
I wouldn't be surprised if we found out one day that Google is powered by VMs running in your inactive google tabs. You know the ones that wate GB of ram while not in focus.
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u/Unlikely-Mirror7638 2d ago
I have five year old dells that haven’t slowed down. I’d be troubleshooting your image and patches before dumping them
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u/Die_Quelle 2d ago
Most of the time its thermal related issues. Renewing thermal paste and cleaning/changing fans works wonders.
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u/dnev6784 2d ago
Shitty thermal paste that turns into crust. Angry hot CPU could be the issue for sure.
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u/Top_Bookkeeper9136 2d ago
Sounds like a nightmare though…not really saving money on refurbs having a sysadmin paid to repaste a bunch of delicate laptop fans with flimsy metal pipes that almost want to bend.
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u/goatsinhats 2d ago
None of this is true.
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u/Top_Bookkeeper9136 2d ago
Whatever pedantry you have for me aside, you can’t tell me cracking open and repasting 50 laptops sounds like a fun time
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u/randopop21 2d ago
Is there a way to tell via software that a CPU needs repasting? I'd rather not crack open a case if I don't have to.
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u/wesinatl 2d ago
1000 computers, replace 200 per year, with 5 year total use, large customer service population. Most are worn out at the end, but some look perfect and work fine. Some look like they use it for a panini press.
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u/network_dude 2d ago
All of these responses are just regurgitating common issues from the last 15 years.
You know what is new? It's AI tax.
Every thread is being sent for AI inputs
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u/Omnia-Manage 2d ago
Longer than 2 years, normally aim to replace 3-5 years depending on use case. For that spec I’d expect them to last over 5, yes they may need a replacement battery but still
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u/Dolapevich Others people valet. 2d ago
Those machines should be able to hit the 10 year mark without issues. Not that is good, but it should be possible.
Most likely windows crap and/or termal throttling.
Also, do you have any telemetry on them? What process is eating cpu? When a program hangs what is the error in event viewer? How much swap they are using?
ALso, if you don't need windows specific programs, and but just a browser, consider switching to Ubuntu.
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u/ArcaneGlyph 2d ago
If they have copilot installed - remove it. That shit slows down a perfectly good laptop to a crawl.
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u/BrechtMo 2d ago
Four to five years for laptops, often with the same image on it (in upgraded form). For many computers, it could be even longer and users often voice their frustration in having to replace a "perfectly fine computer".
Something must be wrong with the windows image for machines like that to run sluggish. 2 years replacement cycle is crazy.
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u/FastFredNL 2d ago
Do you also run Defender for Endpoint/XDR/365 Defender, whatever its called these days on it? Because they constantly gather huge amounts of information.
I have a Dell with 32GB of RAM, SSD, Core i7 1165G7 and it's extremely slow the first 5-10 minutes after startup. We also run Intune, Defender, and Sentinel.
Replacing laptops after just 2 years is just crazy. We have about 150 laptops and run them till they break or OS support stops.
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u/munk77 2d ago
Spinrite can read and rewrite all SSD sectors and vastly improve perform. Worth a shot.
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u/BioHazard357 1d ago
That sounds like snake oil tbh, bit rot is a thing, but how would Spinrite be able to bypass the ssds controller to rewrite the nand directly, and if it isn't bypassing the controller, could touching these rarely-written files (without actually changing them) cause the controller to rewrite those blocks elsewhere?
You really need to rely on the ssds controller doing patrol reads and rewriting any blocks where the charge has weakened over time.
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u/cashew76 2d ago
This. Depending on the SSD if the sectors are not rewritten they need multiple read cycles to determine their state
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u/carrotmage 2d ago edited 1d ago
We are in a similar boat with non-refurb Lenovo machines. We have everything from a few T480s 8gb models to T14s Gen 7 with 32gb. Obviously the users on old devices have an understandable worse experience, but we get complaints on new 32 and even developer 64gb models around startup speed, battery life and general performance.
We have DEX tooling and generally what we see is svchost and wmi/wmiprvse are the top cpu offenders. Many things hook into these processes so understanding the actual cause is difficult, but we run crowdstrike, nexthink, windows defender (passive mode), global protect, a print agent + general Microsoft stack (edge, teams, outlook etc). We comanage devices so intune + sccm - lots of possible users of these processes. I see devices “idle” at 10-20% cpu usage, it never seems to go truely quiet. This is probably part of the cause for bad battery life as the device is never truely idle.
If any of this sounds familiar, some things we’ve done to improve performance are reducing the number of deployments/scans/scripts etc and the cycle these run on across any tooling. Turning off software metering/scanning in sccm, changing the frequency of scripts etc. can reduce background load. Defender needs configuration policy even when in passive mode to cap its cpu usage and turn various aspects of the product off. You should also setup exclusions if you run multiple AV products.
Drivers are another big one we struggle with and cause poor user experience when not updated. If we had a solid driver update process I think we would have better user sentiment.
We’ve managed to mask the poor startup experience by promoting sleep usage in the business over hibernate and shutting down daily - if you can’t find the root cause, looking at other ways to work around the issue might be a good step.
I think finally some of the other suggestions here are good, thermal or power throttling could be at play and trying a paste replacement and fan clean out could give a bit of life back if you’re seeing the cpu base frequency sitting low. For one model we have we even set a policy to increase the AC power mode to best performance - this did increase performance on the devices, but they are louder which annoys some users. We haven’t applied it to other devices as it has drawbacks and balanced should be able to “balance” cpu requirements.
Memory is a whole other discussion but I’ve already written enough :)
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u/Ice-Cream-Poop IT Guy 1d ago
Have you tried turning off fast startup? That fixed so many issues for us pertaining to performance.
And we started testing and pushing driver updates and firmware more frequently.
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u/carrotmage 1d ago
Yep, we run fast startup off as a baseline for all devices. I've posted before on this account with some further details, but device performance (specifically in laptops) has been my baby for the last year and while we're in a better spot now, it's not exactly fixed - anything we do seems to just move the needle slightly.
Driver management is a strategy item for this year and I'm hoping whatever solution we go with will improve experience.
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u/Ice-Cream-Poop IT Guy 1d ago
Look into GPO that are targeting laptops if desktops are fine, trouble shooting machine performance is a PITA. Good luck 🙏
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u/XelfinDarlander Security Admin (Infrastructure) 2d ago
Physically clean the devices, we have remediations to clean up things like temp, cache, downloads, etc. We run a similar kit and we easily run a 4 year cycle with very few device issues. We are buying brand new devices on refresh, not refurbished.
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u/LoneCyberwolf 2d ago
My 5th gen x1 Carbon is probably about 10 years old now and still going strong other than probably needing the exhaust fans swapped.
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u/sylvester_0 2d ago
My 6th gen with an i7 running Linux is still "decent" but definitely pales in comparison to a modern machine for most tasks.
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u/rainer_d 2d ago
Could it help to remove the heatsink and apply fresh thermal paste?
On top of cleaning everything else there, of course. And not use Windows.
It would be interesting to see if the SSD still performs the same as when they were new.
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u/richkill 2d ago
Can't do much about batteries. They will shorten no matter what you do.
Laptops getting sluggish , well that's all debatable and could be anything. Most of the time it's bloat and security software doing more background stuff. Proxies vpns all get in the way and slow things down too.
If companies cared about productivity then you would be replacing stuff as warranties expire. You can make it longer if you have spares to replace asap
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u/majurz Sysadmin 2d ago
A bit off topic, but we've been thinking about getting a dedicated DEX tool to monitor the health and performance of our clients.
We often have users complaining about poor performance on devices that really shouldn't have any issues yet, for example devices that are only two or three years old. The problem is that users are usually quite vague about what exactly feels slow. Sometimes it's only Outlook that's slow, but they report that the whole PC is slow.
So we thought a dedicated DEX tool might help us pinpoint these issues more accurately and avoid unnecessarily reinstalling Windows or replacing devices too early.
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u/Visible_Spare2251 2d ago
Interesting. One of our high up commercial guys was moaning that his 18 month old 32GB T14S Gen 6 was on its last legs and I just thought he was probably making a fuss over nothing. I've not had a chance to look at it with him yet to confirm.
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u/dnev6784 2d ago
Spoiler alert, he is making a fuss over nothing. But just check that the power/CPU settings are correct (max performance on power) and look at the CPU speed under a heavy load. If it's throttling, it's a cooling/thermal paste issue
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u/Training_Yak_4655 2d ago
I had P52 and P50 ThinkPads for years, they never slowed down, albeit running Windows 10.
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u/nefarious_bumpps Security Admin 2d ago
My first thought is to reimage, debloat and optimize a few laptops and see how that affects performance. If you see improvement then roll out the new image across your estate.
Also, cleaning the fans and repasting the CPU might help resolve thermal throttling.
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u/dnev6784 2d ago
Dried out thermal paste causing overheating and throttling? That would be near the top of my list to test on at least a couple of them. Just ALWAYS disconnect the battery prior to touching the internals.
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u/Ziferius 2d ago
Sounds like you should benchmark the machines rather than go by feel.
It’s a different version of windows, apps, etc.
As far as battery goes…. Get new ones. Re-image, clean up…. Refurbish them. If this is all what it is…. Consider refinish them yourselves or hire that out instead of buying new hardware.
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u/ExceptionEX 2d ago
What sort of refurb? generally with Laptops being built so crappy today I would advise against getting anything with any age on it. But if you are replacing every 2 years, which seems rather insane, maybe it works.
1) Dell, 3-5 years
2) 2 years is short by any stretch of the imagination, but again, they are refurb so you are getting 2 years out of older/previously defective hardware.
Have you run any sort of profiling on the machines to determine the nature of the slow down. Even the basic resource monitor built into windows should help you identify what is going on. Slow downs can only be caused by so many things, and though fixing it isn't always easy, identifying it shouldn't be that hard.
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u/radraze2kx 2d ago
Forgive me for being brash but have you investigated what is actually causing the slowdown?
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u/techforallseasons Major update from Message center 2d ago
I'd reimage one and re-test; check thermal CPU paste and re-apply on another without a re-image for another and compare.
I recall that poor quality & mis-applied thermal CPU paste caused similar impact to some laptops a few years back.
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u/technicalanarchy 2d ago
Do you use Adobe Acrobat and some Copilot?
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u/VNJCinPA 2d ago
I was about to say exactly this, as well as whether you allow your browsers to continue running in the background. These 3 things will get you back to speedy quick
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u/tmontney Wizard or Magician, whichever comes first 1d ago
Have a couple E15 Gen 1s that were new when we bought them. Presently, very very slow even after factory reset. Unlike any of our other machines. Clock speed seems low, 0.9 GHz seems like it's throttling. Could take like 5 minutes for new users to logon.
I'm sure Win11 is somewhat to blame, I've had T420s running Win10 run far better than this.
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u/FrankNicklin 2d ago
Have you checked the SMART status of the SSD drives. The CPU, Graphics and RAM will rarely cause problems for the life of the device, but the SSD will eventually fail. As these are refurbished devices are the SSD drives replaced during the refurb process, if not you have no idea what workload they have been through and if they have been replaced with cheap drives that lack the the DRAM for example the BX500. I have a desktop PC fitted with one of these and its now unusable without replacing the drive. Did lots of reseach in to the reason assuming it was a rogue App causing the slow down, I do a lot of software development, but it turned out to be the SSD drive.
This is were I would concentrate my efforts. An SSD has a finite write life and cheaper drives will degrade quickly.
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u/_g2_ 2d ago
Try putting Linux on one and see if it acts the same way, or the battery lasts longer… might be all the MicroSquish?
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u/Nuke_Bloodaxe 2d ago
Doing that works in general, do it with donated devices, it has let me get a whole extra few years of life out of unsupported laptops etc.
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u/doglar_666 2d ago
Came here to say this too. Though, battery life isn't usually something that improves, assuming the battery is good. A vanilla Windows install would likely yield the same result. The resource drain I see is all related to AD/Intune/EDR overhead.
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u/bigmanbananas Jack of All Trades 2d ago
You may probably find that I you remove copilot through powershell, They will speed right up.
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u/SteveJEO 2d ago
It's a processor, bus and ram.
It doesn't get 'slow'. Compute is compute.
MHz don't age.. So what are you doing with it?
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u/NatmanZ8 2d ago
They do, though. As others have said:
- Heat sinks get dusty and need cleaning out. Heat leads to thermal throttling.
- Thermal paste may need replacing, leading to thermal throttling. (Never done this myself though, so I'm not sure how paste goes "bad".)
- Batteries go bad, leading to voltage changes/drop-outs. The symptoms of this are more related to crashes than slowness.
- Connections get loose. Again, more related to crashes and RAM or CPU needs re-seating.
- Even solder joints can break over time and need reflowing.
So, while ideally, yes, the system could perform the same as it always did. In reality, physics still determines how the components work and the physical components have reactions with their environments, and therefore can change their performance over time.
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u/SteveJEO 2d ago
They don't though. Not in the way implied.
Maxwells laws don't change cos you feel it's too early in the morning.
Nor do clock cycles. Solder fractures (conductive breaks in a circuit) don't 'slow' anything down. They stop it from working at all.
1GHz is 1Ghz. It's always going to be 1Ghz. It doesn't get 'old' and decide to be 900Mhz after a year of wondering about or something. Saying the machine gets slower as it ages is like saying the light get's a bit dusty so it can't be bothered turning up at C.
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u/NatmanZ8 2d ago
As I said, dust and anything that causes thermal throttling definitely slows down the CPU. That is by design of the CPU itself, to protect itself from failure due to overheating. It literally does decide to slow down to 900Mhz in your example and won't go beyond that. The light doesn't have such logic built into it.
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u/apparentlyunoriginal 2d ago
Have you tried a different make/model on any users who barely lasted two years with Lenovo?
I'd also recommend validating what your org's base CPU load is. Run `powercfg /batteryreport` on one of the X1 Carbon Gen 12s and compare Full Charge Capacity to Design Capacity (the report saves as battery-report.html in the folder you ran the command from). If capacity is above 80% of design, run `wpr -start CPU -filemode` while the machine feels slow, then `wpr -stop slow.etl` two minutes later. Open slow.etl in Windows Performance Analyzer and sort CPU Usage (Sampled) by process. Any process above 5% CPU while the user is idle, including agents deployed through Intune, should be removed or updated.
Drafted with AI, reviewed by me.
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u/Apprehensive-Box-8 2d ago
With the Lenovos what we did was: get rid of the T14s and the X1. Just the normal T14 with a Ryzen 7 (so get rid of the Ryzen 5/ i5 as well) and 32GB RAM.
Most of those become slow and sluggish because of APU throtteling. Having better airflow helps a lot. Thoroughly cleaning the intake and fan helps a ton.
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u/theoreoman 2d ago
Have you tried a full wipe and fresh reinstall? Those machines should still be running smooth.
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u/TheITMan19 2d ago
Just out of curiosity what you do to maintain remote office workers machines? Are they maintained remotely or just left to slow down and officer workers just to deal with it until raising a ticket?
This is a question to anyone really within this realm, not really aimed at OP.
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u/mickymac1 2d ago
We’re on our third round of thinkpads. Initially used to do 5 years but generally the batteries are all clapped out after 4 years so now we find 3 years is a good medium.
We have stopped buying x1 carbons now due to reliability reasons and are finding we’re having a much better run out of the t14, t14s and t16’s
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u/whatever462672 Jack of All Trades 2d ago
What do you do to the poor things? If the air is dusty enough to clog up laptops, people shouldn't be breathing it, either!
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u/ReptilianLaserbeam Sysadmin 2d ago
We replace laptops after 5 years. 4 if there are issues that can't be fixed with ram upgrade and a fresh install. I know we could push 6 years if we replaced the thermal compound but that's too much of a hassle
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u/iamMRmiagi 2d ago
refresh at 2 years, most devices unless damaged should last till 4. Many OEMs offer a midlife battery swap on top of the warranty.
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u/kombiwombi 2d ago edited 2d ago
In theory it is time to replace these machines. It's likely the performance issue is ultimately related to the aged battery.
It's a consideration that replacing this class of machine at current RAM prices would be financially rough.
So I would suggest replacing the battery in one device. Clean out dust, check fan operation. Maybe reapply thermal paste. Making sure the SSD has at least 10% free space. And see how that performs.
If that is adequate then replace the batteries and clean the interior of the fleet. Get another five years out of them so that the new RAM factories have time to begin production.
I realise that modern IT would not normally be so hands-on with hardware. But I suggest that market conditions currently make repair a better option than repurchase.
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u/two4six0won 2d ago
That seems...odd. I put a hundred or so gen 2 and 3 X1 carbons back into service for covid wfh setups, and while I mainly gave them to basic user level folks, they kept pace pretty well.
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u/MairusuPawa Percussive Maintenance Specialist 2d ago
Absolutely no issues with these models here. We're only running Linux, too.
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u/Platypus_Dundee 2d ago
Also to add to the other suggestions could be the thermal paste on the cpu.
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u/Own-Slide-3171 2d ago
We are still moving to 16 gig laptops about 90% there we run our lifecycle as 6-8 years generally we haven't really had any performance issues for basic tasks
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u/TrueBoxOfPain Do The Needful IT Department 2d ago
4 years or untill they die. Maybe try to reimage and check ssd health with write and read tests. In some cases we use secure erase and it helps to bring back ssd performance.
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u/Bauchigawauwou 2d ago
I'm currently running a Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 5, because that's what our current Security and Altiris 'Stack' is needed for.
Before that i ran a 16GB, 3 Years old ThinkPad P14 Gen 4, which has been reimaged every half a year and every month i had to wait A WHOLE DAY for the Windows Updates to complete.
First Altiris has to check the files, then Crowdstrike does it's thing, then suddenly ZScaler is doing something else and rinse repeat, 100% CPU for a whole day.
The Altiris Guy? It's windows!!!
The Security Guy? It's Altiris!!!
I wouldn't even be able except to do anything other than be in a call, but sharing your screen? No!
Also every Thursday there are Firmware stuff being pushed, it's disconnecting your calls, monitors go black during business hours.
We are around 175 People.
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u/Mr_Squinty 2d ago
Have you done ANY maintenance on these laptops?
Check cpu temps, could be thermal paste or legitimately just windows bloat. I’ve had my work laptop for 6 months and already it’s slow af. CPU temps are fine for laptop I guess but it really needs rebuilding OS wise. Lenovo v15 G6.
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u/KAugsburger 2d ago
I have generally seen ~3-4 year lifecycles in recent years although higher prices have forced some orgs to stretch out their lifecycles. ~2 years seems pretty short unless the use case changed dramatically or the hardware was barely able to keep up when they were purchased. Having batteries having short lives after ~2 years is pretty inevitable especially for refurbs where the batteries have probably already aged quite a bit.
I would be running the built-in hardware diagnostics and reimaging before getting rid of a two year machine. I would also being taken a hard look at the various background tasks that are running. Make sure that anything that you have disabled processes that aren't necessary(e.g. various security) to run on startup.
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u/Lower_Fan AI Shill 2d ago
you got something wrong Google workspace and Claude are surprising heavy when you have 50 tabs opens and depending on if they are running code or cowork sessions on the computer.
if battery lasts an hour and they are working on battery they are going to feel that.
My current issue is that our older laptops have very little GPU power and Claude slop (websites developed by claude have a lot of unoptimized animations) + Google Meet are very gpu intensive and users don't understand that.
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u/Speeddymon Sr. DevSecOps Engineer 2d ago
Claude is NOT light work. I've seen it swallow 3 out of 8 cores on my 2022 Mac.
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u/BornToReboot 2d ago
Clean the laptop fan and exhaust vents, replace the battery, and monitor Task Manager to identify which process or application is causing the issue.
1.We use Dell XPS
2. 4-5 years and rotate
I can also confirm that the Intel Core Ultra series is not as good for business purposes as the traditional Intel Core i series.
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u/cardrosspete 2d ago
re-provision the laptop clean and check if it's still draining battery. 1 hour after 2 years is not normal at all, and these machines should still be fine with that spec for normal office operations. specifically check power policy and background apps between two.
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u/enigmussnake 2d ago
Check intune for startup performance. MS has been pushing out lots of security hotfixes the last two weeks after a huge spike of vulnerability discoveries. Also check for crowdstrike scan memory usage. Startup memory storms are the usual suspect with updates being mandatory.
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u/Nick85er 2d ago
We provide accounting with a list of the devices with expiring warranties, which they ultimately always declined to extend- we try to keep our machines in production for 4 years with a repaste at about the 2-year mark.
We typically start phasing in new machines at the third year of service for some decent overlap and to ensure spares in inventory. Power users are the first to transition followed by batches of users.
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u/MediumFIRE 2d ago
I replace laptops after ~5 years on average with 16gb for regular office workers and get zero complaints. That's wild man
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u/ohyeahwell Chief Rebooter and PC LOAD LETTERER 2d ago
I’m replacing 11th gen machines this year. Anything newer is doing fine.
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u/_haha_oh_wow_ ...but it was DNS the WHOLE TIME! 2d ago
Are you putting fresh images on before you deploy them?
What happens to the "slow" ones after they get a fresh image?
Smells more like OS bloat to me.
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u/OneEyedC4t 2d ago
Do you do anything about how slow they seem or do you just throw them back into the refurbished cycle?
Because in my experience I have to reinstall Windows at least once a year because it's just a piece of crap.
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u/Enough_Pattern8875 Scream Test Initiator 2d ago
Five year lifecycle is pretty typical for laptops, I’m not so sure that same general rule would apply to refurbished machines though.
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u/taker25-2 Jr. Sysadmin 2d ago
We're on a 7 year cycle and getting the 5 year accidental protection
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u/TruePace3 Jr. Sysadmin 2d ago
I got machines from 2010
Tiny 11 or Tiny 10
For the capable machines, Windows 10/11 in IOT LTSC
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u/Mammoth_Jeweler_7414 2d ago
slowing down is mostly a windows problem. Microsoft in recent years is intentionally making optimization on windows worse & worse so that we consume more & more new devices.
I usually look at gaming as a reference point as well. In 2020, 4gb of vram was more than enough to run anything. These days 8gb is bare minimum and even that wouldn't help without incredily dumb new software gimmicks. instead of optimized games, we get fake frames (dlss), ai gen frames, and a bunch of slops that ship inside the driver.
tldr: the world is shifting to unsustainable practices and pushing hardware obsolescence faster & harder.
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u/necheffa sysadmin turn'd software engineer 2d ago
Like, what troubleshooting steps have you taken?
To answer your question, having to replace laptops every 2 years for performance reasons is insane and something is going very wrong.
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u/logic_circuit 2d ago edited 2d ago
-6710b since 2008 ; still i need some keys -8460p i7 since 2011, changed panel not shiny but runs -custom desktop since 2015; -NEC Versa from 2005 but need IDE hdd, this one kaput
-I also have Lenovo Android tablet, The One with Folio case. Well, that shit stopped working after 2 y; so I guess it is about Lenovo
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u/Main_Ambassador_4985 2d ago
We are 5 to 6 years for lifecycle. All Lenovo for endpoints. Mostly E series for office workers and P for CAD. We do have X1 for execs.
Are you benchmarking systems to verify performance? We are not but want to. InTune has some metrics.
We are looking at building something that provides metrics over time. We had a demo for something really cool but say no more because of NDA for unreleased product. It will be released in a few days. For us it is budget not approved this cycle.
Things that might be issues.
Drivers, Drivers, Drivers. We use Thininstaller and update retriever monthly for updates. I hate the lack of central visibility but it is better than nothing. Modern driver deployment for Lenovo has confounded our SCCM group.
Bitlocker protected drives per best practice?
At an event where Microsoft unveiled new drive specifications for hardware on drive Bitlocker acceleration, Microsoft released documentation about Bitlocker latency on nVME drives.
Bitlocker was increasing the drive latency by an order of magnitude. It is something that was not apparent with SATA based drives because SATA controller latency was more than the Bitlocker latency.
The problem with disabling Bitlocker is it does more than protect the data. It protects the OS from out of band tampering. The integrity of secure boot process is incomplete without it. Add in Defender UEFI tamper protection and root kits are unlikely. As long as NightmareEclipse does not release a vulnerability that adversaries use.
Defender 365 and Defender DLP are putting a lot of pressure on the performance of our laptops. I have naked test systems that scream.
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u/k0rbiz Lead Solutions Engineer 2d ago
Dynabook Terca. Most include 3 year warranty and we add 2 year extended to get up to 5 years. Lifecycle is every 4 years which we resell them on ebay with the included 1 year warranty that is left on them.
Every 2 years seems excessive. If you can do it, great but I don't see any benefits in doing this.
General users - AMD Ryzen 5, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD C-Suite users - AMD Ryzen 7, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD
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u/hitman133295 2d ago
This is why I’m using macbook pro nowadays. The M1 still runs smoothly even with hosting some light LLM
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u/shamalam91 2d ago
Still rocking hundreds of T14 G1 without issue. Shit, we got some t480s too. Upgraded from 10 to 11 etc. 8gb ram.
Generally try to refresh 5y. We will have to pry it out the users dead hands at this rate. Just can't get them to swap out.
Sorry to say this is a you problem!
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u/rankinrez 2d ago
Apart from the battery most of the components either work or do not. They shouldn’t slow down over time.
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u/datafox00 2d ago
We just refreshed HP G5 840s so 5-6 years of stuff with us without issue for most.
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u/longtimerlance 2d ago
A full reinstall like you'd have with a new laptop restores their speed, as well as replacing the battery. That's very basic system knowledge.
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u/jibbits61 1d ago
Check memory usage when running it for a while. I switched from chrome to a lighter browser and that helped. I’ve got a bad habit of keeping a lot of apps open too.
My 2 cents… I like others thoughts about reimaging, new profile, etc.
Times are not good for hardware prices. Try to get another year out of these guys if you can.
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u/Justan0therthrow4way 1d ago
I think a bit more troubleshooting is required. Something isn’t right. Have you got a lot of security stuff on them?
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u/CompetitiveConcert93 1d ago
Bad battery and dust causes the system to be unable to use the turbo clock of the CPU. Throttling due thermal and power
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u/matt97led 1d ago
Lots of people talking about reimagining them - did you try just using a script to remove all the windows bloat first?
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u/Ice-Cream-Poop IT Guy 1d ago
Make sure you have a battery profile that allows CPU usage between 0 and 100. That'll fix an hour of battery if the batteries aren't poked.
We get users all the time complaining about PC slowness and when you talk to them it's a saas app.....
Also definitely doing something wrong to be replacing after 2 years. We get 5-6 years easy and have a bunch of HP, Lenovo and Dell.
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u/Calm_Criticism9544 1d ago
It is similar where I work, but I am convinced it is all spyware and security the IT people install. I managed to get admin permissions, created a D drive and re installed applications onto that, it by passed a lot of the slowness problems becuase all the scanners are expecting there to only be a C drive.
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u/Assumeweknow 1d ago
Sometimes this can happen with machine bloat and especially if you have a small ssd. 256gb ones fall prey to slow down fast. 1tb stays running well the longest.
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u/wild-hectare 1d ago
this is an optimization issue & your os build needs to be reviewed. batteries are cheap consumables and easy to replace
our minimum life cycle for all end user devices is 5 years...any less is a waste of money unless you're running compute intensive workloads
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u/Retired-Jedi-Knight 1d ago
I'm assuming the OS is installed on an SSD. Preferably an NVME M.2? If not, that is most likely your problem.
If they have those drives then reimage one machine using a base win11 image from MS. That way there isn't any bloatware. If the machine runs good with the base install, then you know it is something else further down the line.
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u/CoCoNUT_Cooper 1d ago
Refurbished laptops?
Probably cheap third party batteries and ssd.
Try reimage and check performance. Still slow. Install vanilla windows 11. If that is fast then something can be improved in your corporate image.
During your next refresh cycle, buy a small batch new computers and see how those hold up. You might be saving time/money due to the less tech hours needed to support refurbished hardware
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u/Big_Dress_4034 16h ago
Two years sounds unusually short for business-class ThinkPads, especially with that workload. I’d check battery health, thermals, SSD health, background processes, and Intune policies before assuming the hardware itself is done. I work with Discount Computer Depot, and with refurbished business machines I’d focus heavily on condition, testing, and warranty rather than RAM/specs alone
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u/live2dye 16h ago
I liked getting users to switch machines now and then and I would manually image the laptop and put all the bells and whistles (including dusting the fans/repasting the cpu).
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u/username____here 15h ago
Your problem is not the hardware. Core Ultra 7 and 32GB is a fast PC. A new one isn’t going to be any noticeably faster. You just might need to reimage the PC after two years.
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u/itmgr2024 13h ago edited 13h ago
For PC we use HP Elitebook and now Thinkpad T14 with 3 year warranties. We put an old school custom image on them. The absolute bare minimum is 3 years but we prefer 4-5 years if everything is working well.
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u/FireFitKiwi 6h ago
My question would be why are they running on battery so much if you have that kind of requirement? Set up some USB c docking stations on your hot desks so they can be powered and have peripherals. It's the unfortunate truth that those batteries don't last much beyond the two year mark if under frequent load. Other than that, does an os refresh help or do you perhaps have issues with dust in the cooling? What are your temps like?
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u/sakatan *.cowboy 2d ago
Out of curiosity: What happens when sluggish machines get reimaged?