I'm tinkering with it almost yearly and making minor upgrades whenever possible. So maybe year or 2 max

Lets see, in terms of the "important" parts, my desktop is something like 14 years old. Ish. I've replaced the power supply after lightning, an hdd that died, and I think had to add an Ethernet port after that lightning hit too. But the mobo, pcu, and gpu are all the same.

The last thing replaced was the hdd, and that was..... Ahhhh, maybe five years ago? It was either right before covid hit, or right before it started getting bad, however long ago that was.

If you mean replacing the entire thing, that one replaced one that was around five years old.

In fairness though, the games I was playing back in 2015ish were well within my newer PC's capabilities. I quit gaming once my back got bad enough that sitting there long enough to do anything fun made fun impossible. So after that, it turned into a music box for all intents and purposes. The various kids would maybe play roblox or something similarly mild on it, but that was it.

So, as long as not everything major dies, I won't replace the entire thing at all, I'd just replace parts as needed/possible. Unless someone just outright buys me one after hearing me bitch about it being slow to transfer files, or whatever. I'm ata point now where I could game on it again, but I need to add a second drive to it, and I'm lazy/forgetful when it comes to hobby level stuff.

I've looked at upgrading the mobo and cpu, maybe increasing the ram too, but I can't justify the expenditure when I'd have to use a credit card for any of that. Plus, chances are I'd buy the hardware and it'd sit around for six months waiting on me to have a great back day. So, I doubt it'll happen.

I tended to alternate between upgrading the video card and the cpu/mobo/ram every few years when playing games falls under my acceptable threshold. I got lucky by upgrading ram and the video card last year and my current system will most likely last for a decade as it is pretty solid and I am playing fewer demanding games and games tend to look pretty solid even at lower settings nowadays.

I am still gaming on my Dell laptop with Intel Iris graphics.

(my main platforms are GeForce Now, Switch and Xbox Series S)

The last PC I got was a hand me down my old boss gave me that he built for playing Flight Simulator. I think I had it for at least 10 years. It had Vista on it, but sometime in the last couple years I put Mint on it.

I used it originally to play World of Tanks until something broke on it, I think the wireless card, and I fixed that. After that it served as a media PC to stream things. Now it mostly collects dust as my phone is powerful enough for 90% of my computing, and anything more fancy I'll use my work laptop or the wife's PC we get like 4 years ago when she went back to college.

I also use an ancient Walmart grade HP laptop that takes like 5 minutes to boot and has no battery to play with synth and piano VSTs hooked up to my piano.

I've wanted a used PC for a bit, maybe a Mac Mini as I hear they're better for audio, but I've never gotten around to it.

About 8yrs

Does installing Linux on an old Windows laptop count as upgrading? My current Jellyfin hardware is from 2013ish, and my "everything else" device is an old surplus ThinkPad that I acquired from my previous job a few years ago, both now running Mint.