Dreaming of a ten-year computer

In the PC world, using your computer for 10+ years is quite common, especially if you haven't much hardware needs like Alex. I've got a PC I bought in 2017 with 32 GB of RAM. The only problem would be Windows 11 incompatibility (and that's easily solved with mainstream Linux distributions these days). On the hardware side, of course I can swap any failing part.

I recently upgraded to a fancy modern machine with a Ryzen 7 8840 and I barely perceive a difference in performance from my 7(?) year old Precision 5540. I get ~10 hours on Linux (with power save settings) from both, benchmarks are ~25% faster on the new one and things are slightly snappier but my life isn't better. Moore's law stopped for CPUs a while ago and e.g. L1 caches won't grow. We have had 10 year computers for a decade.

My current machine is an nb51 X210: https://blog.mattgauger.com/2022/08/01/the-51nb-x210/

The chassis is from 2010 and the aftermarket replacement motherboard is from 2016. It's the best machine I've ever owned by a large margin, and I hope to continue using it for many more years.

The biggest constraint for doing this with a laptop is obviously the battery. My previous Thinkpad that I used until 2023 was an X301 which had two battery bays, but they were both fairly thin. It was impossible to order a working aftermarket battery for that device. (I tried twice and both times I got a battery that ballooned up and threatened to crack the chassis after 2 months.) But with the X210 the battery protrudes out of the bottom and is quite a bit thicker, which means that aftermarket batteries can be constructed out of high-quality, readily available lithium-ion 18650 cells. This makes a big difference!