What the hell do you do with yours? I have a 2yo work laptop that gets taken home every night and is absolutely fine and a 5 year old personal laptop that also gets lugged to band practice once a week (and associated exposure to beer, sweat, dropping, and risk of crushing by 4x12) and it doesnt show any signs of failure either.

I think you might be doing something wrong if you only a get a year out of yours.

Actually java datatypes are machine independant so they can be serialised and unserialised across architectures. Altering the size of the primitive types simply because your happening to be running on a different wordwidth cpu is a bad idea for portability.