How long can a PC last?

[Ten Four]

I'm typing this on a Dell 530 daily driver purchased new in 2008, running Vista at the time. A few years back I switched to Ubuntu and love it. Use it nearly every day, and it often stays on for days or weeks. Never had it open or cleaned anything. Everything works fine. The funny thing is that running Ubuntu it is more responsive feeling then my work machines in the office running Windows 7. But, 95% of what I do is Internet, word processing, some light spreadsheet stuff, and photo storage/light editing. Nothing too demanding. That's part of the problem with the PC market--why buy a new computer when your old one does everything you need it to do?

 

[fdalbor]

This is not related to the post; but I have a Compaq Deskpro 4/33i that I keep running to fool around with a desk drawer full of old DOS/ WW programs that I just enjoy playing with. It still runs like the day I bought it used over 12 years ago. I get as much enjoyment out of it as I do my brand new HP Envy all in one touch screen with 8.1. Laugh at this, it has a 20MB hard drive, thats right not 20GB, 20 MB. I also have an Atari 800 that still runs fine using the cartridge programs, the disk drives gave up long time ago. I would love to find a working one (disk drive); but alast I know that is impossible.The old saying they don't make them like they used to is true.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

I have always built my own (and friends' and family members') for as long as I can remember. Some are older than your's. Mass produced PCs are more prone to failures due to cost cutting on parts and higher operating temperatures (potential and new customers can hear high volume fans but not feel the heat from their absence). I would think hard before replacing parts in most mass produced PCs but would usually do that in a home built.

 

[hack14u]

Most everyone I have seen fail was due to bad or leaking capacitors on the mainboard. Sure ram can go bad, hard drives for sure, but mostly the mainboards as has been said above. Me personally, I have a 5 year old Dell running like a champ, but the only "old" part in it is the mainboard. When that goes, I will just upgrade to a newer one that supports more.

 

[DavidinCT]

My PC is about to complete 7 years and now I am worried about its life... How long can a PC last at max? I used it heavily earlier..but from past 2 years since i bought a windows phone, my PC usage has gradually declined..

Can I continue to use a pc for as long as i want by simply replacing parts that go bad with time?

A well built PC could almost last for ever. I work in IT and I do a lot of data center work. So we were checking out some older machines that are running in the data center, on a OLD HP Prolant server. running WIndows NT 3.51, the server was up, with NO reboots (thank god for power backup systems) for 10 years. Yes, 10 years.

It's common in my field to see some windows machines/servers (not day to day users) be up for 3-5 years.

It's all how it's built, if you get a good company's mother board that is known for being reliable, you might just have luck.

The other question is, is it worth it ? If your computer is running good, then that is cool (I have a few Core2Quad machines, 5-7 years old that still run good) but, in time, the performance drops to an almost unacceptable level and you can keep it going but, if you have to wait 2 min for Word to open up, is it really worth it ?

And I agree on upgrading computers, fairly easy to do (tons of stuff online), I just upgraded an old Core2Quad to a i7 5820, 16gb of DDR4, GTX970 and a few other parts, ended up costing me around $700 or so for evertying. A PC configured with these specs off the shelf is $1500 or more.

I saw some i5 and i7 combos on ebay going for $150-300, A simple swap (MB, Ram and CPU), if you have all the other gear in your PC that you can use...Fairly cheap and dump in a SSD for the OS and it's whole new world....

 

[sibeans]

My 2010 refurb SL410 is still kicking! For upgrades, I invested about $100 for the CPU, RAM, ReadyBoost drives, and a replacement battery over five years; plus compressed air cans for internal cleaning.

It shipped with 7 (had Ubuntu installed for a while too) and was upgraded to 8.1, then back to 7 and now 10; which runs it really well given certain hardware limitations. The original T5870 (2.0 GHz) was replaced with a slightly newer but cooler and more powerful P8800 (2.67 GHz) for the processing gains and minimizing the cooler running all the time, and the fact that core 2 duo processors are dirt cheap. The battery was replaced once with a reputable 3rd-party battery manufacturer. Made use of an SD card and a flash drive both dedicated to ReadyBoost; it's not earth shatteringly faster but actually helps with boot times and program launches. The RAM was upgraded to a slightly faster stick but the SL410 shipped with x86, and I was teased with x64 Technical Preview installed.

The parts that are showing their age are a 5400rpm hdd, an aged network card, an Intel GMA (could add and external GPU via ExpressCard slot but that's the effort and price for about half of a new rig), OS locked to 32 bit, and weighs like a sack of bricks.

The part that will remain timeless is that ThinkPad keyboard! It was the design before the chiclets took over, and if I could extract it and use it as a desktop keyboard I would do it!

In my case, I was able to upgrade the CPU and a slightly faster RAM but held off on the HDD to SSD upgrade (which is possible while using the DVD drive as a 2nd HDD bay) due to price/return.

So, my best advice for keeping older PCs in rotation is to look up what different hardware options that are officially supported by the OEM and upgrade accordingly.

 

[tgp]

I work at a place that does PC repair, and dozens of PCs come through here every week. Blown capacitors is probably the most common problem with non replaceable parts. On a consumer grade PC, that often starts at around 5 years. But of course, YMMV. Business grade PCs often last much longer.

If a customer brings it a computer complaining of it being slow and/or unstable, a cursory glance over the capacitors is one of our first steps, especially if it's at least several years old.