7 years of service: Gigabyte P34G v2

How did it hold up?

My current notebook served me well over the past 7 years. I bought the Gigabyte P34G v2 in 2014 and up until very recently I had only a small number of complaints. Over the course of a few years the battery started to degrade pretty quickly. It never really had a good battery life to begin with, getting about 3 hours in the beginning. Around 2017 the battery began to quickly lose its charge more and more. Today it cannot hold a charge for more than 5 minutes. Yes you read that correctly: minutes. Even the slightest increase in power draw would cause the battery to fail.

It was like this since a few years and it did not bother me much since I did not really take my notebook with me anywhere so I did not need the battery life anyway. However in the last couple of months the battery started to swell. I regularly clean all of my hardware from dust and when I opened the notebook I noticed that the battery became bigger to the point it concerned me. We all know that unfortunately batteries do not last very long compared to the rest of the hardware in a notebook.

Battery and repairs

After a couple of years their design capacity degrades due to a number of factors:

• heat
• number of charge cycles
• keeping it charged close to 100% all the time
• keeping the charge level at a very low percentage

Modern batteries like it best to keep them charged between about 40% to 80%. If you are lucky you can still buy a replacement battery for your notebook after a few years of use but not in my case unfortunately. Swollen batteries are of course a fire hazard. I was uncomfortable sleeping next to a ticking timebomb so I disposed it conveniently at our local recycling yard.

I had to send the device back for repair in late 2015 due to red and blue pixels suddenly appearing all over the screen. Next thing that was starting to go bad very lately was the screen once again. It started to draw a thin line throughout the monitor. I think its the video ram starting to go bad for some reason. Nothing I can do about unfortunately.

Other than that I was and still am very happy with the device. It still has enough processing power with its 45W Core i7-4710HQ and a GeForce 860M. I fitted it also with a (expensive) 256 GB mSATA SSD from Crucial back then. However 2014 was the year when 60 FPS Videos became popular and it was also the year where the x265 Codec was introduced. This means that my new notebook back then lacked the hardware decoding capabilities and had to fall back to inefficient software decoding which of course did not help with battery lifetime.

Still I see no reason to retire it completely or even throw it away. It will serve its purpose as a backup computer very well.