On 27/08/16 11:34 AM, Anthony de Boer via talk wrote:
Alvin Starr via talk wrote:
The reason for laptop upgrades is often needing more memory or disk space but by the time you get there 2-3 years down the road the keyboard has food bits under it and the touch pad is wearing out so getting a new laptop is the way to go.
I had a Thinkpad from around 2000 that lasted more than a decade; it was solid hardware and I didn't abuse it. And ultimately Moore's Law caught up with it, even though I'd maxed out RAM once that got cheap and upgraded the hard drive.
I could probably haul it out today and get it booted, but why bother?
Lesson from that is buy it to use it not coddle it, and plan to upgrade in not more than five years. Though maybe Moore's Law is levelling out?
I'm still using a ThinkPad X60 (2006) bought in July 2007 and a ThinkPad T61 (2007) from Nov 2007 as my primary machines... My X60 has a SSD. Both had RAM maxed. The T61 has been shelved for the past year though, hard drive died and I haven't replaced it yet because the keyboard/fan need some attention if I'm going to continue to use it. I've used both these machines heavily... I've been seriously considering a new machine on and off for about 3 years... that is, I've been wondering whether or not to buy a new machine for the entire lifespan of many other people's machines! Not quite 10 years of use, but the X60 is into its 9th year. (I feel like there's a bit of a difference between a machine from 2000 in 2010 versus a machine from 2006 in 2016 though... Moore's Law has been applied in a different way over the last 5-10 years, in that my refurbished X60 might still be competitive in some ways with some lower-end netbooks sold today, but I the same wouldn't be true of a laptop from 2000 in 2010.)