Don, Truthfully I did not even check the shocks on her car before I tore it apart. The spring seats were blown out so I was in there for that and I told her that the struts were going to be out of the car at that time and that at 120k she might want to consider replacing them as we would not be back in there for another 100k. With that she opted to replace the struts while they were out. While doing the struts I noticed that one of them would not stay extended very well. In other words when you pull the piston rod out to full extension it slid right back down with little to no resistance whereas the other side took much much longer for the rod to slide back into the cartridge. Typically when I am looking for a soft or worn out strut you bounce up and down on the bumper and see how far and fast it compresses, how fast it rebounds, and how many times it bounces up and down before it settles. Past that I take them for a test drive and see how they handle. On a bad shock the thing you notice the most is how easy it is to compress, on the bad ones you can literally dribble the corner of the car like a basketball. If your struts have 150K on them you might want to consider replacing them. However, if you do your own work it is not a critical. If they are in satisfactory condition then leave them in and change them out when you feel that they are worn enough to dictate it. On a regular customer car the decision that has to be made is whether or not to take advantage of the overlapping labor that exists because you are doing the seats. It is a couple hours labor plus an alignment either way and if the customer has the $$ it makes sense to do the struts then and save them the cost of doing the same labor all over again down the road.