WE BOUGHT a Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop in July 2001. It was made and sold in Ireland. We still use it on a weekly basis because it can crunch background processes very efficiently by leveraging a gig of RAM and a 1-GHz processor. This five-year-old piece of kit is the longest-serving technology in my personal workspace. I mention this because several times a week, people land on this blog when searching for "lifespan of Inspiron 8000" which suggests there are a bunch of these heavy twin-fan laptops still working after five years. As Google reveals, its battery is its weak part. Ours lasted four months. We never replaced it. Unlike some people's, ours never even got hot or felt like it would explode.
Photo of Inspiron 8000 next to the computer that replaced it for most of its multimedia college support activities.
