Thoughts on extended warranty for laptop

[Cheeks]

My wife bought a laptop for work last yr & the manufacturer warranty is ending next week. Today, she received an email from Lenovo offering to extend the warranty. So far the machine has worked fine.

 

Are extended warranty’s on electronics ever worth it?

 

 

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[Pabo]

I have never bought extended warranty for small electronic devices that I have purchased for myself or for my employer. The only thing we had purchased extended warranty was for our server which we had 3 years warranty from new, extended it for another 2 years thereafter. Eventually we had to retire that server as we had outgrown it and we ended up going online for our programs and data storage. But this server costed us AU$40,000 and the 2yr extended warranty costs about AU$2,500, which for us was a sound investment as we had replaced 4 fans, 5 harddrives, some RAM and also a couple of power packs, which if we had purchased these ourselves, would have amounted to 2-3 times the cost of the extened warranty. Mind you, this server was put through hell and back with 20 odd users using it.

 

I have purchased over 40-50 small electronic devices for work, and usually they have lasted about 3 years before we had any issues. If they did, it was usually under warranty or that it was the user at fault. Some of the laptops I have used for work are over 12 years old now, which contains software that we no longer have which some of our clients still use. Even the desktop computer that I had repurposed and upgraded for our Kingdom Hall is now 12 years old.

 

I generally would expect a laptop would have a decent usuable life for 3 years before breaking down. But it also depends on the specs of the device and what type of quality parts they use to make it, and also how you use it itself, is it in a dusty environment etc.

 

However, if you had issue with the device whilst under warranty, and that you are not skilled at doing any repairs yourself or don't know anyone who does, then it maybe peace of mind to purchase such warranty.

 

It also does come down to cost as well. Is the extended warranty is 10% of the originally price you paid for the device, or it is 25% of it's original value?

 

There are so many variables, but I would check online if other people had issues with the same model laptop that you have, and see their comments on their experience of the device they had, and whether there may be a common problem with that device, or even claiming things under that extended warranty.

 

Also, too, here in Australia we have Consumer Laws where even though the manufacturer may have a stated a warranty period, but if you paid a premium price for that premium product, even though it breaks down after that manufacturer's warranty period, you protected by these consumer laws which will still enforce the manufactruer to rectify the fault if it is reasonable to think that that part shouldn't not have failed before it should have. Not sure about where you are in Canada though.