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....