When do you consider your computer too slow and must be replaced?

It takes a lot for me to want to just completely get a new computer. Usually if my computer is running exceptionally slow and awful (which has yet to happen to my lovely 2 year old Macbook Pro), I just try to pinpoint the problem and fix it. My computer speed increased a lot when I added more memory to it as well. It used to be 4gb, now it’s 16gb and moves a LOT faster and smoother

It’s been well over ten years since I had a computer that slowed down like that. Now it’s more like “I can’t upgrade my operating system any more”. My son had an old dome iMac which was great for him, and worked fine except it couldn’t be upgraded so it could not support newer applications or an upgraded browser. But we haven’t had a problem such as you’re describing since we got off of Windows ME in 2002.

When it cannot run the software I need it to run in a timely manner.

When it cannot play videos without stuttering, or my gaming framerates drop below 30 frames/second (the same as a standard TV broadcast). As a side note, a lot of people think their whole computer sucks when this happens, but it’s usually merely because they are using integrated graphics or (rarely) an old, uselessly weak graphics card; many computers can be made to appear to speed up simply by dropping in a decent nVidia/Radeon card. My computer got a slight across-the-board boost with a GT240, and a real kick in the pants with a GTX 465 even for basic tasks like the Windows desktop. Right now, I’m running on a 3-year-old computer that is perfectly fine after adding in a better video card despite the fact that the CPU is three generations behind and was a low-end, budget chip when it was made.

Realistically, most people can do just fine on a PC that is obsolete by 3–5 years so long as it has at least 2 GB of RAM (much of that taken up by Windows) since most people do nothing more hardware-straining than Netflix. Gamers, graphics designers, and engineers (especially software engineers) have far higher requirements. Those who try getting by with anything older than a Pentium 4 and/or on less than 2GB of RAM should consider replacing their system though, since such a system has no chance at running much of the software that has come out in the last few years.

@cutiepi92 More RAM generally helps, but only to a point. If you do a lot of multimedia editing or CAD then you want as much as you can fit, but generally once you get past about 4GB, you reach a point of rapidly diminishing returns. My desktop runs 6GB, of which I rarely use much more than half of it for normal, day-to-day stuff like gaming, or image editing, though it bogs a bit when transcoding video.

My 4 year old grandson said “I don’t want to use your laptop, grandma, there’s too much lag”. So I replaced it.

My almost 5 year old Gateway notebook is still running like a charm. I never get to the point with computers where they run slow, I just trip over my laptops and fracture the screens. lol

When major components fail and you can’t readily get new ones. I’m in that boat now, after my GPU kicked the bucket (along with 2 USB ports and an optical drive), and the motherboard is so old that there aren’t even ports for the newer stuff.

@jerv I use Photoshop and Maya a lot (as in they’re almost always open) so eh it helped me lol

@cutiepi92 Photoshop? Then yes, definitely install all the RAM you can. I’m not sure 16GB is enough for PS though…

it is, PS runs really smoothly on my machine (now). With 4GB it was a nightmare.