is it normal for a laptop to have a 5 year lifespan?

[Bofferbrauer2]

curl-6 said:

My current laptop which I bought in 2015 is starting to be really annoyingly slow and freeze/crash with just 3 tabs open if I open a chat window at the same time a video is buffering or something. The one I had before it also lasted 5 years before becoming basically unuseable.

Is this normal? I can't think of anything I'm doing to wear it out, I don't push it to its limits, I pretty much only ever use it for web browsing and Youtube/Netflix.

Also, any recommendations on what brands are good for a replacement? I'd like to get one that will last me a longer time, spending nearly $1000 for 5 years of useful service just isn't good enough in my opinion.

It depends on the hardware in the Laptop. And if the <$1000 price tag of yours is any indication, this probably means a 2c4t CPU with low clock speeds and potentially slow and small memory, either of which is woefully inadequate these days, but if all comes together is slows to a crawl now. Speaking of which, can you tell us what you have in your laptop?

On a modern laptop these days with a Renoir/Cezanne Ryzen 5 or 7 or on the Intel side a Comet Lake with 6 or 8 cores or, with reservations since they only have 4 cores so far, a Tiger Lake, the CPU should be able to hold out longer and not get squashed as fast. It also helps that memory has evolved quite a bit since then (most laptops in 2015 still came with even by DDR3 standards slow-clocking DDR3L) and models with 16 or more GB of RAM are getting easier to find than models with 8GB or more back then.

As for the supposed replacement, what is your usage scenario? Do you need a slim, small and light model or can it be a bit bigger and heavier? Do you need or want the numblock or other extras like an RGB keyboard, a convertible build, a large hard drive/internal storage? And what would be your budget for the laptop?