Well, first of all, that’s a good reason to choose a desktop unless you need portability. But I have 2 Dell’s and a Lenovo Laptop working fine and being used daily. The Lenovo is a Thinkpad I5 with 8GB and SSD and 6 going on 7 years. It has a stack of photo aps on it. It’s light and plenty fast, but it wouldn’t be my first choice to stack 100 images. One Dell is an I5, 8GB that I updated the HD to SSD, and it’s 8-9 years old. I use both of these machines running Win 10 with multiple aps open every day, and they are by no means slow or limited. The last Dell is an old XP, 1GB machine that I use for a dedicated task (audio testing) - must be way over 10 years old. I turned it on several days ago to test a dbx expander, and it runs my audio test Ap just fine.

The net-net is I have no idea why you feel 4 years is the max life for a machine unless you never update your OS/drivers or are buying into a throw away and replace philosophy. I believe in buying the best cameras, cars, computers, tools, etc. that you can afford, maintaining them well and keeping them for a LONG time. For example, the 2006 Mercedes in my garage with 135K miles that I bought new (when I had a company car allowance) and maintained by the book looks and runs like the day I bought it. I have no intention of replacing it any time soon, if ever.

Well, first of all, that’s a good reason to choose a desktop unless you need portability. But I have 2 Dell’s and a Lenovo Laptop working fine and being used daily. The Lenovo is a Thinkpad I5 with 8GB and SSD and 6 going on 7 years. It has a stack of photo aps on it. One Dell is an I5, 8GB that I updated the HD to SSD, and it’s 8-9 years old. I use both of these machines running Win 10 with multiple aps open every day, and they are by no means slow or limited. The last Dell is an XP, 1GB machine that I use for a dedicated task (audio testing) - must be way over 10 years old. I turned it on several days ago to test a dbx expander, and it runs my audio test Ap just fine.

The net-net is I have no idea why you feel 4 years is the max life for a machine unless you never update your OS/drivers or are buying into a throw away and replace philosophy. I believe in buying the best cameras, cars, computers, tools, etc. that you can afford, maintaining them well and keeping them for a long time. For example the 2006 Mercedes in my garage with 135K miles that I bought new (when I had a company car allowance) and maintained by the book looks and runs like the day I bought it. I have no intention of replacing it any time soon, if ever.

That’s one approach, but not the only valid one. My I7 desktop was assembled (by me) in 2012. I bought the fastest CPU I could afford, 16 GB, a fast video card, decent sized power supply and all SSD storage. 9 years later, other than updating the monitor, the only thing I’ve done is add another 16GB of memory when I got another camera that produced big files and some more SSD. It boots in 10-15 sec and runs 8-10 applications including PS and a dozen windows open in the browser simultaneously and I NEVER wait for the machine. When it gets too slow, I’ll update the MB and CPU and possibly the memory (DDR3 to DDR4 or 5), but everything else will stay the same. Now THAT is the way to have good computing power for many years at minimum cost.