this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
378 points (96.8% liked)
Asklemmy
43935 readers
926 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Is that realistic? Not a rhetorical question: I'm genuinely curious. I ask because the last time I tried to update a single (desktop) part, it was more cost-effective to replace the whole Pc and migrate the salvageable parts since the only thing I could have held onto would have been the ram, SSD, and PSU.
I suppose with a laptop you have the monitor to also consider, and admittedly I know nothing about laptop boards, but it just seems like 6 years is replacement time anyway, at least for a daily use computer.
The last time I replaced my PC the hardware was ca 12 years old and barely working. It went to the recycling center except the harddisk.
Honestly, we don't know. Average laptop screens haven't had any major improvements since IPS, so I think the screens have longevity. RAM and processors are more focused on lower power nowadays. Framework has already shipped "drop-in" replacement boards, and their whole company is based around that idea.
If I had the money and i could afford to wait, I'd be willing to take a bet on Framework. I think the frame of the laptop will hold up as well as any other, but it's only been a few years so who actually knows.
Laptops from 6 years ago hold up well enough, except the batteries and main boards, if I could have replaced my old main board with a more modern processor and gpu I never would have had to upgrade.
So far as your desktop, you can certainly upgrade your computer without it being more cost effective to do a whole new build. It really just depends on what you need. Mostly it comes down to the limitations of your motherboard.
Every so often they change the CPU socket required for new CPUs. So if you need a new CPU and you already have the best the socket on your mobo can do, then yeah you're maybe looking at a new build at that point anyway. But otherwise you can just get an upgraded CPU of that socket. Similarly, eventually your motherboard won't be able to support the latest version of RAM and if you need that you'll have to replace the motherboard. So on and so forth.
Great in theory.
Keeping backwards compatible hardware is nearly impossible in reality. USB A 3.x is not the same hardware as USB A 2.X despite keeping form-factor backwards compatible.
Practical exercise: Find a board capable of swapping DDR4 RAM with DDR5 or vice versa.