I do incremental upgrades. Built mine in 2007 and so far upgraded my video card & RMA faulty mobo only. Will upgrade hard drive soon to 1/2TB. Use only for surfing, photo editing, office work & occasional gaming.
hmm am still using my PC since * counting with finger * 6-7 years got upgrade my graphic card. and CPU fan and that all ( also added RAM thanks to arp! ) haha.
My past 2 PC were "salvaged" PCs... I had 2 Pentium 4 setups given by my friends. Then I had a Core 2 Duo 2.2ghz where the motherboard and CPU was free.
about every 4 years I get the itch to build a new one, otherwise it's a piece by piece upgrade, HDD, etc
Since I work mostly on my notebook, I usually do a massive upgrade every 3 years. I'm now itching to get a new notebook. Preferably one based on Sandy Bridge even though it's nothing special. I aiming to get at least USB 3.0 (and eSATA if possible) and 8 GB of RAM.
I do occasional upgrades (upgraded graphics and disks in the current PC), but the time between CPU/MB changes is growing longer. I bought my first PC at the end of 94, and tended to get a new one after 1 year 10 months. But last time it was 3 years, and the current one will probably last three years too.
For me? I used to change/upgrade parts every 4 months. Stopped doing that already Now my gc needs replacement,keeps giving me rice grain artifacts at times
last upgrade my system is last year september where i bought a gtx460 but the rest is around 2009 but my casing a cm stacker ive used since 2004, talk about loyal
Frankly saying.. Nothing. that bloody thing is on stock clock + custom cooler. Thats all =/...aging maybe >.>... Gotten a new psu few months back so can't be psu causing the issue
You can get a SSD for the operating system and applications if you find things are still "slow" despite upgrading your system with more memory and/or faster CPU or graphics card. As long as you don't need to load your work files on the SSD, you should be away to get away with a relatively small SSD - 60 GB or so. That should be pretty affordable. You can check how much space you are using right now on your OS drive to get a rough idea of how much space you need.
Aprox. 2-3 years is my update rate and going for mid to high range components that way I can get more for less.