About 4 months. Acer Chromebook.
2x MacBook Pros - 2011 and 2012
10 to 12 years old desktop. First generation i5 but with SSD.
Desktop 4 years old, bought shortly after starting a new job, went on Scan and configured something to last me a while:
Quad core i7 4790K (currently not OCd), 16gb ram, SSD + HDD, Nvidia GTX 970 960
Fractal Design Define case - built like a brick shithouse, big + heavy + black, sucks the light out the room, with internal sound damping stuff.
Das Keyboard - cherry keyboard, alu top panel, sweet volume knob, no key markings just because.
27" Acer IPS monitor.
Running Arch Linux with Win 10 in VM.
One of mine, 39 years old 😀
Quite a few older PC/Laptops - SSD's make them so much more usable.
I've got an old 'mini' pc in the garage for music, it's got nothing on it, but because it has a normal HD it takes minutes to boot up (OK less than 120 seconds).
Main laptop is 5 years old - I7 4 series with an Nvidia GTX740m, 16gb ram, 1gb SSD, 1GB HD, OK for games still (although not at the res my son likes) but it's fine when away from home. It still runs lightning fast, but games are starting to out run it.
Main PC is a refurbed Lenovo workstation, 8gb, but it has a Zeon Server processor, and a Quadro graphics card - it's possibly about 7 years old, but we got it for a song a couple of years ago - swapped in an SSD, and the thing is fab for general office work, and internet - blisteringly fast (price new on these was £1500) - more than fine for general work - two screens.
Son has a gaming PC - about 4 years old but I7 4790k, GTX 970, 16gb, 3 large monitors -runs everything in HD, but he is complaining of slight 'stutter' in some brand new games now. He has to fund any upgrades if he wants, as he ploughed a lot of money into it at the time. He is into racing sims, so 3 screens look ace with the G29 steering wheel too. All I can hear now is the rumble of the force feedback and swearing as the race doesn't go too well (he's now 18).
1 x 6 year old HP Pavilion (upgraded SSD) which my daughter uses all the time for 'League of Legends' - still does the job, although the battery is knackered.
2 x I5 4 series ex office PC's - 1 as a media pc for the telly, and 1 in my 'arcade cabinet'. Both have SSD's.
SSD's have made a huge difference, and , unless you game, then there is getting less reasons to upgrade.
Dell Precision, M4800.
It’s about 2 years old.
The IT chap has just put Windows 10 on it, which seems ok.
It runs Inventor quite well.
No idea what size it is inside, has a 7i sticker on it.
2005 Sony laptop it won’t die
Feels like a good excuse for a screenshot!
Although not the oldest machine we have kicking about, my daily works laptop - a Dell Studio is circa 2009 - came with Intel i7, HD 1920x1080 screen, ATI Radeon (SSD & 8Gb have been added since) and I find the performance indistinguishable from my home 2018 Asus Zenbook that cost about the same... Used for development not gaming mind. What happened to Moores Law? Ok the Zenbook is thinner but the only real improvement is the Zenbook gets 8 hours on the battery while the Studio only ever got 60-90 minutes...
2007 Mesh bought at the launch of Vista. Triggers broom though, everything but the motherboard and case upgraded. That said the spec is modest, dual core Intel processor, maxed out at 4gb ram, 1GB graphics card, 3 spinny hard drives, two parallel one serial. Serial drive has XP to run legacy software (Autocad, Silent Hunter III), another drive Ubuntu 16.05LTS which is nice and stable, and the last drive I keep putting modern distros on to see how they run.
The secret to long life is cleaning dust out of them and knowing how to reinstall OSs.
8 year old 17.3" Samsung Laptop i5 2410M with 8Gb of ram
Main drive is now an SSD drive with the original in a caddy in place of the optical drive.
Its still running as sweet as a nut apart from the keyboard that succumbed to spilt coffee so have a USB one plugged in.
Thinking about a new one but its only at the thinking stage 😉
Do have a 2016 gaming PC upstairs that's pretty hi spec and an older 2007 desktop out in the workshop that runs through an older Samsung smart TV
I 'upgraded' my nans pc with a cheap ssd, it was running a duel core s775 chip, so a tenner for a quad core from Cex, and a a few more quid for an extra stick of ddr2 RAM. It was on its knees before but it absolutely flies now, but then it's only used as Web browsing /media machine.
About ten years old? Never been inside the case. Its struggling now tho
My daughter is still using my 10 year old HP HDX18 with SSD. Celeron dual core 1.8GHz I think and 4GB RAM. Runs W10 and Office 365 a treat. Except for the cracked plastic case and missing/worn keys it's like new. Better in fact, since it came with Vista!
Cougar
Subscriber
Dell Studio 1735 laptop, August 2008 vintage. Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, cost me £800
Snap. Although mine is now very, very slow.
Last of the 2010 Mac Minis, optical drive swapped out for a second drive. That drive failed a month ago, sadly, the WD My Book I was using as my Time Machine backup, has been misbehaving, which has meant my iTunes library, which was about 220 Gb, is now only about 100 Gb, that’s all that could be restored.
Thankfully, I’ve kept all of my cd’s, plus the DVD’s full of ripped music a mate has given me, and all of the sampler cd’s from The Word, Uncut and Mojo, so it’s just a long-winded process of re-ripping the cd’s.
Why not put all my music into Apple Music, then just download it all again? I would, if the highest bitrate available was 320Kb, or better still, Lossless, but it’s 256Kb, and I rip everything at 320, I’m not prepared to downgrade the quality further.
Oh, I’ve also got an Apple PowerBook somewhere around 2005, a G4. Haven’t used it for years, it needs a new battery, but otherwise still works fine, looks brand new.
Place I used to work at, their studio was still using a couple of old Mac desktop towers, somewhere areound 2000/2001 vintage, the anthracite/clear ones, as servers, and there was a Bondi blue/clear one from 1999 in storage. One of those was my old dual processor machine I did all my photoshop retouching on, until I got made redundant; it was good to see the machine still being used. My former studio manager and company director managed to keep hold of a couple of the Macs after the business finally went under, he got a job in the studio of the place I got a job at, and carried on using the old Macs for server work.
256Kb AAC is equivalent to 320 in other formats.
Think my 17" Dell laptop is 4 or 5 years old now. Was a reasonable spec (i7 4500U / 16Gb RAM) at the time and still handles my audio/photo/video (admittedly not 4k) processing with relative ease even without an SSD transplant.
Unless something falls over big time, I reckon it will see me another couple of years at least.
Might help I mostly run Linux rather than Windows?
8 year old VAIO. If they still made them, I’d buy a replacement, but they don’t, so I’m keeping it until it dies.
About ten years old? Never been inside the case. Its struggling now tho
its probably chock full of dust...
2008 Mac Pro
There’s nothing to replace an indestructible workstation like that, except perhaps a slightly newer second hand one.
Hurry up and release a proper new Mac Pro, Apple.
I felt like that until I saw the new Mac mini spec.
Desktop about 7 years old. 8g ram 500 g hd. 128ssd. I5. Going turn into server by adding a 2* 4tb for mirrored raid.
Laptop 1 year old. I7 32gb ram. 500gb hybrid hd. Once I have server sorted this will get a 2tb SSD.
Snap. Although mine is now very, very slow.
Two things.
1) SSD and a wipe / reinstall of Windows 10.
2) Is the fan also running full tilt constantly and it's shutting off under heavy load? I had mine in bits many times to clean out the fan over the course of a few months a good while back, but it always looked clear. Then one time I saw a bit of fluff sticking out from between the fan and the external heat sink vent, picked at it carefully with tweezers and extracted a hitherto-unnoticed ball of fluff the size of my thumb.
I have a little Asus X102BA that is over 4 years old now. It wasn't much over £200 when I bought it but it's really slow now
I don't use it much as my internet browsing is mainly via ipad
I could do with speeding it up but I don't know whether it's a poor spec (suspect so given the price) or something else and therefore whether I can upgrade it easily
Keyboard is about 13 years old I think, newest part is about a year.
2015 macbook pro
Just sold my 2011 MacBook Pro as it hadn’t been touched in years. Realised I was using my phone and tablet more than the computer. No longer have one in the house.
18 month old MacBook Pro touchbar. I buy a new one every 3 years as the second hand value is still high and there’s usually a significant performance bump.
Might buy a Mac mini and eGPU very soon as that can take 64gb of ram.
Rarely keep a computer for very long, did have a G5 tower for about 6 years though, was sad to see it go as it so well put together.
Lenovo U310 - bought 2012, added maximum memory in 2013, SSD fitted in 2014. Pretty cheap and works well.
Two windows laptops. One is 7 years old and the other 5. Hardly use them though - pretty much for everything on phone or tablet
Our main home computer is a mid 2007 iMac with a hybrid drive installed, which is still sufficiently sprightly for anything short of large HD video editing. We’ll keep it going until Apple stop doing security updates for it at which time it will be replaced by an iPad or MacBook since the current iMacs are too big for the kitchen counter it lives on. I also have a trigger’s broom PC for games/video editing, the oldest bit is the Lian Li case which I think dates back to 2004.
