Computer Life Span

Desktop: 4 years old, I changed the GPU after a year because it was faulty, haven't had any trouble since. I also upgraded the RAM from 4GB to 6GB because I had a spare 4GB stick lying around.

Laptop: 1 year old, I added 4GB of RAM to make a total of 8GB after having it for 2 months.

Just over a year now, memory was faulty when I just built it, many bluescreens, replaced it after 1 week and everything has been fine since.

This particular one I'm using more than 10 years, maybe 12. Had to replace the psu, change the thermal paste on cpu and video card fan, refill the fan with new lubricant and the original dvd drives died from burning too many disks :P

Other than that, it keeps working :D

I change my desktop hardware about every 2 years to make it updated. But I never upgrade my laptop since laptop is not designed for gaming and rendering. I still keep my 5 years old laptop.

I've had a laptop since 2003-ish.
Pentium 4 is indestructible man.
No parts ever needed changing, lately the windows boot stuff got messed up and I should fix that.

My current PC was built in 2010. In the mean time I have replace the CPU (AMD X3 425 to X6 Phenom 1090T) and upgraded from GTX460 SLI to GTX660 SLI. I think my PC can go for an other 3-4 years or so before I really need to start worrying about performance ;-)

It really depends on how well you choose your components. I usually "future-proof" my builds by anticipating the market for the next few years and then building accordingly. Most of my builds have lasted five or more years before needing major upgrades. My current rig is pushing six years, now, and I'm still running today's games on it. If I had $2000, however, I'd probably build a new system (that would last another ten years) and give this one to the kids. I've only had to replace the power supply, thus far, but I did decide to upgrade the graphics card and HD (totally optional).

Base: 5 years old. It has a dual-core CPU. I've recently started using a mild overclock to keep up with 2013 games. Upgrading to a 4-core CPU for the same socket is not worth it; I'll just replace it all together when it's time.

GPU: 3 y.o.. Old one is still working, just couldn't keep up with newer games. :)

SSD: 1 y.o.. This one will carry on to the next PC.

my last computer lived for 10 years, never turned it off left it running 24/7 for all 10 years. before i put the computer to rest i looked at its HDD stats. and it said the computer was restarted a total of 133 times over 10 years

the key to a long life computer. is to never turn it off. turning a computer on surges power over your components and lowers life span.

think of it as when you turn a light bulb on by a switch and the light "pops" and breaks. same thing happens with computers

i just built my current computer all brand new parts. have had it for almost a year. still going strong no issues. and only restarted it a few times. i plan for it to go for at least 5 years before i think of upgrading cuz its already a beast

My last build was at the end of 2009. I have only changed my GPU and added an SSD since then.

none.

Had an ASRock Socket939 board, which I started off with a cheap AMD Duron CPU back in 2006. The nice thing about this particular board was that it accepted these custom AM2CPU daughterboards that ASRock made, to let you upgrade from Socket939 and DDR1 to Socket AM2 and DDR2. By the end of my upgrading, I got 6 years out of the system, running a custom firmware from OCWorkbench on this Black Edition AM2 CPU I had, which unlocked two more of the processing cores. Eventually, the caps on the south bridge connection of the original board started to fry and pop, but after I noticed that, the system still worked reliably for about 6 months off the daughterboard processor. Best of all, all the upgrades were on the cheap, since the parts had been out for a year or two by the time I bought them.

TL;DR

I put a mobo in your mobo so you can OC while you OC / I'm gonna pop some tags / Only got twenty dollars in my pocket
/ I - I - I'm hunting, looking for a come-up / This is freaking awesome

The only part that really 'died' from my computers was a 1TB HDD that stopped working after about 7 years. Well, not really 'stopped', but it is about to and I had to change it ._.

Watch for dust and it should be running fine for many years.
Upgrade graphics card if you ever need more power for games or the cpu for extra speed in other stuff.
SSD ( a large one 256GB ) is always a great future-prood choise that will make your system feel significantly faster.

Had my prev for 5 years, nothing died but I upgraded(You couldn't call it even a mid-tier PC when it was new)

My current system is going on 4 years. As originally built:
Intel Core i5 750 (2.66GHz Stock)
4GB RAM
GeForce GTX 470
1TB HD

I've upgraded it some since then along the way, and it is now:
Core i5 750 (still running stock 2.66GHz)
12GB RAM
GeForce GTX 660OC
64GB SSD + 1TB HD + 1.5TB HD + 2TB HD

It has a Corsair H50 water cooler on it, and I have tested overclocking it. It can run up to 4.2GHz and remain within the i5 750's designed temps and run a stress test for 8 hours without errors. Any faster and it gets too hot and begins to have errors during the stress test. I left it at the stock 2.66GHz because it ran everything I had at the time without needing to overclock. Now I'm at the point where I'm either going to overclock it or build a new system because some new games are not running good maxed out. I run BF4 on high, it will go to ultra, but the frame drop in places in a MP game is unacceptable. Farcry 3 runs maxed out, but I do notice a slow frame rate in certain places. It's SP and runs fine most of the time, so I can deal with it. If I had Metro Last Light, I'm sure it wouldn't handle that game maxed out.

I still have my previous system set up for my niece to play on. It's 10 years old now. It's an AMD 4400+ with a slight overclock on it. It has 2GB of RAM and a GTX 260 in it. It can still handle even some new games on high or max settings though.

My system is a mostly stock Gateway GM5474, It current runs XBMCbuntu without a video card. I need to upgrade the power supply. I just purchased RAM for it after finally giving out in September (ran from manufacture date to 2013).

Laptop is an ASUS K52DR from Best Buy that's beginning to show its age.

Well parts of my main machine are older then other parts.
CPU, Motherboard, ram and Blu-ray reader are all less then a year old.
Case is about 2 years old.
3rd party Heatsink and fan, Power Supply, Videocard are all around 4 years old if I remember right.

My second system is quite old, all the parts at anywhere between 4 and 6 years old with the case being 7 or 8 years old.

I still have other parts that are quite old but still working fine when I need them.

I only change parts in my main machine when the games I play start going under 30fps which is not often. My current machine should be good for at least another 2 years or so before I really need to change out the video card for something new.

I've been using my PC for about 8 years. Still works fine.

Had mine for over 5 and a half years. Purchased a new GPU about two years ago since I was having issues with the original.

Have my current setup since november of 2011, only thing I've changed was GPU (I think that was in the summer of this year... could be the year before, it does not matter), and even now I do not have the best, newest and most expensive one, but it works and haven't find a game I can't play in native resolution on high/ultra yet. It does help that I'm below 1080p though (1680x1050).

I should also mention that my case, HDD and monitor are from my previous setup, which I had since 2007. I just changed C2D/DDR2 intestinals to i5/DDR3 in 2011.

I used my old Celeron 333 Mhz for 7.5 years, then gave it to my parents... who used it for 3 more years... then it went to a friend who used it for a year... and then forwarded it further to someone who needed it. So yeah, those buggers can work for a long time.

My current PC, I have had for about 2 years now. But my fiance is using my old tower to game with which I originally purchased in 2005. Needed a new hard drive, some RAM was added to it, along with a new power supply (the fan was getting noisy) and a new tower so it felt like new to her.

I tend to build towers high to middle of the road when it comes to the standard out there. I prefer to assemble a new tower every 5 - 6 years. I typically drop about $1k on a new tower.

My current one was built in late 2008 and it's getting to be time for a new one, although I can still play most games. My one before that was from early 2004.