Business Casual

I've had the same Desktop PC at my house for about 9 years now. It's had some issues as I've had to replace a power supply and a case fan. I've also installed an additional hard drive back when 100 GB used to be a decent hard drive space, installed a wireless network card, and added some basic Bluetooth connectivity. So I have done a bit of maintenance to my machine. I also understand that I'm above the skill level of the average user so my experiences with computers may be skewed.

However, my gast gets flabbered when I hear of people that have to upgrade their computer after two years because it's running slowly. Unless you're an avid PC gamer or running some hyper-intensive programs that requires a lot of power, I don't see any reason why a computer shouldn't last at least five years. Most people only use their computer for a few tasks, and it doesn't take a brand new, state of the art machine to surf the Internet, email, play music/movies, and store pictures. The real reason is that they just can't keep their computer in good working order.

Am I being unreasonable here? Should people be replacing their computers every three years? Are Mac users exempt from the life cycle? The comments are always open if you have an opinion.