Most modern electronics have been using lead-free solder for the past few years (to allow them to be sold in Europe and California). From my experience in manuf

Most modern electronics have been using lead-free solder for the past few years (to allow them to be sold in Europe and California). From my experience in manufacturing, I'd say that the long-term reliability of lead-free solders is still rather poor. I don't have much confidence that electronic devices made after about 2005 will last 25 years. Maybe in a few years time, the reliability of lead-free soldering will return to the levels of lead based solders just before RoHS came out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Substances_Directive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Substa... When circuit boards heat up and cool down, they expand and contract. Ideally, a designer tries to match the coefficients (as much as is practical) so that all the components expand and contract at similar rates. Because they don't, the solder joints get stressed, and over time can become brittle and fracture. Then, they'll be intermittant connections that, depending on where they are located, may or may not cause intermittant operation, or a computer that shuts off/reboots when it is hot. A motherboard has on the order of 10^5 solder joints. Because of the speed of changing products, and the ease of doing so, and the very thin margins for distribution, there is no money left in the system to make repairing computers affordable or profitable. It has been cheaper for more than the last decade to discard computers than to repair them. And to change that would mean severely restricting models of computers and the parts that go in them. I used to work in the automotive industry, and keeping parts on the shelf to repair 10-15 year old products was rather common.