[mnutt]

Don't replace it if it works for you, but due to Moore's Law computer hardware doesn't age that well. Older guitars that are well taken care of sound as good if not better than shiny new ones, but after a certain age your computer begins wasting your time.

Most programming time is spent sitting and thinking, but when I act I want the computer to respond as quickly as possible, whether compiling or running tests or opening a website.

That's not to say I don't share the sentiment about computers becoming less hackable and more consumer toys. It's a shame that laptops these days have almost zero user-servicable parts.

[pygy_]

Macs are actually remarkably serviceable, thanks to their limited product range, and iFixit.

My only computer is a tweaked 5 years old MacBook Pro, underclocked to 1 GHz for stability reasons. I've replaced the optical drive with a big hard disk, and the primary hard disk with an SDD. Stock 2GB of RAM.

Except for CPU-bound tasks (mostly HD videos, and the ocasional ./configure && make && sudo make install), it flies.

[gtani]

The earliest MBP's probably need that heat paste thing redone, but 2008 and later Core Duo 2 MBP generally last as long as you don't flex the logic board (don't carry it by one corner), and keep it reasonably cool. One of hte older generation MBP had clips for logicboard that were ver fragile.

For linux, the US$7-800 core i5 toshibas and HP laptops at Costco work pretty well, except for wifi on the Realtek chip set. 8M RAM vs. 2M on a 5-year old laptop is a big diff.

[keithpeter]

"For linux, the US$7-800 core i5 toshibas and HP laptops at Costco work pretty well, except for wifi on the Realtek chip set."

Keyboards: Lenovo E350 (AMD) and Dell dell XPS L502X were ok in the shop, but the rest flexed badly when I typed.

[gtani]

Uh, that's gig of RAM. Heh