Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Assume a standard, inexpensive modern laptop, left in a standard laptop bag for 300 years, under cover, in a dryish, but imperfect environment, such as a cupboard in a house.
How much of it would remain? Would the battery have burst, corroded or caught fire? How much damage might we expect? Might it still work?
How long could it reasonably last for and still be a functional laptop?
Interesting Question. From personal experience and over 35 years in " IT", including a Factory Warranty Repair Certification for HP Laptops, I can confidently say the following to your query:
In 300 years, it is likely that what remains would be identifiable ( to a historian) as a laptop. It is virtually impossible that the device would be functional, and unlikely that items such as plastic cases, LCD/LED screens and internal flex cables would survive, as most of these plastics become quite brittle with time. The battery would likely leak and corrode all nearby parts. It is unlikely to catch fire, as the charge and current needed for a fire would have dissipated during the first few years. Magnetic media such as a hard drive will eventually lose magnetic 'charge', and become unreadable. Most HDDs I have are unreadable after 10 - 12 years.
Under undisturbed but less than perfect storage conditions, I would expect an otherwise fully operational laptop to be irreparably unusable, with no available replacement parts in 30 years or less. Some components may last longer, but as a whole, a generation or two of lifespan is about it.
Note: it may be possible to properly store components in airtight vacuum sealed conductive bags and extend component life span. I do not believe any form of storage would allow a 300 year old laptop to function.
It's possible many of the electronics could survive and still be functional. Many of the capacitors may not make it. The batteries, however, would most likely not be functional, even if they managed not to leak. Batteries are full of very reactive chemicals and would essentially consume themselves over the course of 300 years.
If you disconnected/removed the batteries and attached an external power supply, it might be possible to power up the machine. But this is not the same as booting the machine. Like Joe says, the data on the magnetic platter hard drives would likely be gone. Even solid-state drives (SSDs) and the boot PROMs lose data over time and would likely be so full of data errors the machine would not boot fully.
Heck, with the billions of bits flying around in every machine that must be in perfect order, its a daily miracle that modern computers work at all.
How long could it reasonably last for and still be a functional laptop?
As other answers state, the laptop will be far from functioning.
...and after that time, perhaps no one could be really interested in any tests whether the device could be functioning. It won't be necessary.
Imagine technical progress last 100 years. I think after another 300 years it could be quite a standard thing to create functioning clone of the device: scan critical microelectronics on molecular basis, recompute parameters of damaged electrical components via knowledge base addressing our era (and using additional simulations of circuits) and then print functioning clone of the machine. Perhaps some attempts can be made to scan its storage media and reconstruct readable remnants of stored content. Regarding operating system, it could be obtained from Digital Archive of some Mankind History Museum. So having a bootable clone of the computer should not be a problem 300 years later.
And maybe there even won't be any need to clone the device physically: Maybe nearly any citizen could use their All-Capable Assistant device, request Historical Software Emulator module, run today's operating system taken from Mankind Digital Archive and scan storage hardware of found laptop on molecular level. (Using micro-bots, i.e. best without any physical manipulation with laptop which would obviously cause its further damage.) Retrieve remnants of information and use some of digital archaelogists' tools to recover as much as possible to get at least some files in file system. If you had luck, you can end up running Word 2010 with ImportantMemo.docx file. :)
Various answers refer to plastic parts degrading, cables getting brittle etc. While this certainly does happen, nobody goes into why it happens.
The vast majority of plastics are chemically stable by themselves. but they are not chemically inert. They decay by reacting with oxygen, sulfur compounds, assorted nitrates, and ultraviolet light just to mention a few.
Vacuum sealing is a very poor option - the case will have considerable pressure applied to it by the bag, and many solids will outgas in a vacuum. or a chip will pop open due to an internal air pocket.
If stored properly in an inert-gas atmosphere, at room temperature, in total darkness it is possible the thing will be usable some centuries down the line. Creating 120VAC 60Hz power to start it will be no problem at all - the PowerMate 6000 attached to a Mr. Fusion will have that waveform available in the Historical section. Or straight DC if the power supply doesn't work anymore. Your 3D printer/replimat can make a compatible adapter.
Laptops will likely fare better than desktops as they don't use large electrolytic capacitors. Those things are well known to go bad just sitting there.
As well as the above, chip making is itself a statistical process due to doping and electron migration etc. The chips themselves will lose their precision due to wandering impurities from quantum effects and the like, even though they are sealed in the usual semiconductor packages.
Capacitors and batteries fail/leak (as described in other answers) so your power handling and power regulation goes splat, and that's fairly crucial for a laptop.
Many plastics and polymers (including insulators) aren't stable over very long time periods; think of how they yellow and become more brittle, and they may have undergone very long term repeated heating/cooling cycles over the years, so they will be very fragile. Good luck opening them without damage too, for the same reason.
Their cooling fans wont work either. Can it cope without forced cooling? Hope so.
Data storage won't hold data that long - forget Windows; booting, BIOS and firmware failure is more fundamental.
Over time metals can also fail. Will the metals themselves have kept their form and function?
The proper answer here is: Who cares?
There are really only two feasible cases:
1) We haven't had a technological crash. The laptop is only of interest to archeologists and museums.
2) We have had a technological crash. The laptop's battery is dead, you have no source of power. Whether it works is immaterial.
As indicated in other answers, the laptop would be a mess. Fortunately, the Company of the Transistor, a non-profit founded in 2200, dedicated to "the preservation, study, and reproduction of 20th and 21st century electronics", will be happy to provide spare parts and even complete replica systems.
In your world building context, does it matter whether the laptop is an actual 300 year old artifact, rather than a relatively recent reproduction that better represents how the laptop would have been when in use?
Have you tried to run browse the internet using Netscape Navigator to browse the internet after 2010? It's doable, but it's far from efficient -- in fact, most websites are completely deformed from Netscape's browser point of view because of the numerous improvements that programming has seen (HTML5 in 2014, for instance)
The funny thing is that, Netscape's latest update wasn't that long ago -- it was in 2008. In a mere 8 years, Netscape has been rendered nearly impossible to use.
The same applies to hardware technology. If the laptop was perfectly maintained and the damage of time were to be ignored, the odds are 'WiFi' and 'Bluetooth' would be stuffs of the past. Likewise, battery chargers, even power outlets might look different in 300 years from now on - perhaps they'll be wireless, something that is not compatible on a 300 years old laptop.
USB slot might not have the same shape, perhaps we'll be at USB Type Z version 44 by then, so most of the new technology would be incompatible with the 300 years old technology. It might not even be possible to find a compatible charger for the laptop!
But assuming that there was already an OS installed, it might work with what is already installed on it, but there probably won't be any internet, or any slot compatible with the newest technology.
Of course, that is if we ignore the fact that in 300 years old, most of the hardware would've been completely impossible to use due to the fearsome power of destruction also known as time.
