My dad has a laptop I used to use, which has been working well so far. Recently, he got frequent out-of-memory (RAM) issues - the computer freezes, forcing to restart. It is hard to diagnose, but it might be that 8GB RAM might be too small even for light workload these days.
So, I just checked when it is produced - 2015-10. So it is now 10 years old. While I am wary of producing e-wastes, maybe that was long enough life we got out of it. Perhaps it costs more in electricity than buying a replacement laptop? So, I want to ask - is it time to retire this laptop?
I have a ten year old server that was once a thin client (think the precursor of mini-PCs of today). Could it be more energy efficient? Perhaps. But it’s always been a good little server, and today it’s my SyncThing “file server” ensuring that the latest copy of a document is always available right away on all clients. PC hardware of all kind of expensive these days, so I’m not jumping to replace it while it serves a useful purpose and the hardware is good enough for those tasks.
Maybe it can one day evolve to be a personal laptop that you don’t need to share with your dad, or perhaps, a server of some kind. But what useful means is highly variable. It depends on your needs and the use cases.