How long do you keep your laptops for basic office work?

[MrSquished]

This is for people who do not use laptops to do intensive tasks like gaming, video and photo editing, or 3d modeling, etc...

For those of us who just use our laptops for general office work and browsing, how long do you keep your laptops?

I'm currently rocking a Dell XPS15 with a touch screen, which is seven years old. I have a new 6 cell battery on the way as that has obviously deteriorated.

 

[quietdad2]

Still getting it done with with several Lenovo T530s. Albeit all upgraded to the max with i7 3520m cpus, SSDs, 16gb memory , B;uetooth . WIFI G and a 1920 x 1080 screen. Rocks just fine with internet and Office and the Adobe sweet

 

[manly]

"It depends."

To a large degree, computing hardware has been overkill* compared to the mainstream tasks that people do (media consumption and basic productivity). Only niche areas like gaming or content creation benefit much from the latest hardware. We're well into the realm of diminishing returns, so upgrade cycles can be a lot longer.

The main gating factor is software support, i.e. Microslop arbitrarily using 2018 as the cut-off for an in-place upgrade to Windows 11. Or likewise, Apple supporting its hardware for typically around 7-8 years.

My 2017 XPS 15 is holding up well in its 9th year. I like using PCs as long as possible, so if nothing fails, I'd be happy to squeeze out another 4 years.

* I realize it's apples and oranges, but a current iPhone 17 Pro compares very favorably in benchmarks to an upper tier PC from just a few years ago. It's massive overkill for people to doomscroll TikTok and FB with lol.

 

[SamMaster]

At work, we have a strict policy of 6 year lifespan for laptops, 8 for desktops. Sometimes we can stretch it for budget's sake, but no more then a year.

 

[In2Photos]

For just a basic browsing the net type laptop I keep it as long as I can use it without me wanting to throw it out the window! I have an ASUS from 2016 that I still use for browsing and doing my taxes.

 

[CP5670]

My last surface pro 7+ was about 5 years. It generally worked fine but the battery life and fan noise is much better on current models, and I wanted to buy before the price hikes this year. I sold it on ebay for half of what I paid back then.

 

[Steltek]

In my prior government job (at the time I retired the second time, anyway), it was supposed to be a 4 year replacement cycle, but always ran ~18 months longer due to budget issues. And, the political hacks I was working for always vastly overpaid for under-performing hardware. AKA typical federal government BS procurement processes.

Personally, I'm still using my old Dell E4310 refurb from 2010 on Windows 10. It still has the original battery, which still provides ~2 hours of use when not plugged in. The only upgrades I ever added was to max the memory and replace the original 7200rpm spinning rust drive with a 2.5" 1TB SSD. If it is still working when the Windows 10 extended updates expire, I'll probably just convert it over to Linux Mint for use as a cheap throwaway carryound.