There are users who always want to be up to date and do not hesitate to invest money to update it almost every year or two. However, for many other users, buying a PC is a investing a lot of moneyalmost a sacrifice, and so they hope it lasts a long time in good condition.
Your old computer is not that old
Let’s put ourselves in a situation: you decide to invest a property Amount of money in the purchase of a new state-of-the-art computer. You mount it, set it up and immediately get it working… you’re thrilled with how it performs and what you can do with it. Two, three, four years pass and the PC continues to work without problems, although it is true that it “crawls” to do certain things, and you can start to think that it has already become obsolete and that the moment came to change this.
Of course, a four-year-old PC is not old at all, provided you build it with quality components, because it is true that some hardware elements wear out over time, such as the power supply, the fans and especially if you have installed a liquid cooling kit. However, if during these years you have done regular maintenance and cleaning, they should continue to work perfectly, and it is not in vain, for example, that many manufacturers of quality power supplies grant up to 10 years guarantee, sure of the durability of their devices.
But, leaving that aside (you’ll probably have to change the liquid cooling AIO kit at 4-5 years), in reality a PC this old isn’t old at all, and with a simple layout You will see that it stops “crawling” in some applications, because what happens is that over time we accumulate many installations and uninstallations, saving and deleting documents that can saturate the system operation and reduce its performance.
You may also notice, especially if you update the version of the operating system and programs, that each time it slows down a bit. That’s partly because the builders want it that way, since the supposed requirements for it to run smoothly increase, but that doesn’t mean your PC is running poorly, far from it.
So when does the PC become obsolete?
Now, if there comes a time when your hardware is no longer compatible with certain programs and games, it could indicate that your computer is already too old. We have seen this for example with graphics cards: games evolve, use different engines and use new versions of graphics APIs, such as DirectX. For this reason, some older graphics cards are not compatible with newer versions of DirectX, and this could be a good indication that your PC is getting outdated (although in this specific case it would be worth updating the graphics card , sure).
Another indication that the PC has become stale is that even after completely formatting it and installing the operating system from scratch, you still notice a lot of sluggishness. Ultimately, while a CPU and RAM can last you a lifetime, storage devices also experience wear and tear (both mechanical HDDs and SSDs), and there may come a time when that no longer worth upgrading your PC and deciding to go for the purchase of a brand new one.
How many years must pass before this point arrives? It depends a lot, it depends on how much maintenance you have done on hardware and software, and it depends on how programs and games have evolved. Normally, a computer up to 6-8 years old usually continues to work perfectly, but from personal experience we will tell you that from this age you can already consider that you have an old PC.
