Typical lifespan of a windows laptop?

[Rebelwithallthecause]

How long would you expect a windows laptop to be happily functional for without slowing down to a frustrating pace or needing parts replacing or upgrading?

Two to three years in my experience. But I use mine heavily.

From my experience, they slow down a lot after 2-3 years and are almost unusable by 5 years unlike my MacBook which is still performing brilliantly after 7 years.

Based on general consumer expectations for a purchase like this though, I think most would expect somewhere in the region of 3-5 years of decent use, i.e to last the length of a uni course if purchased for a student etc.

Ours is about 5 years old but we did swap the hard drive to a solid state one and add extra memory a couple of years ago, which transformed it.

It was previously unusably slow, which I couldn't understand and it's only used for general web surfing, occasional office work, no gaming or graphics stuff and is quite a decent spec.

My "home" one is 9 years old and hanging on for dear life

5 years ish. I got my first laptop in 2005 and am on my 3rd.

Dh's is about five years old and still fine. But he only uses it for occasional Web-surfing and a bit of excel. I don't think there's anything additional installed on it from the time he got it. Tbf he should have just gone for a chrome book, it's like having a jaguar for a weekly run to the shops.

Mine takes a bit more of a battering and is showing signs of slowing at four years old.

Mine is over 6 years old and used near enough all day every day, as I'm chronically ill and basically spend my days watching Netflix/browsing social media. I must have hit lucky with mine!

Well, when I was chatting to IT support at work the other day, asking if there was anything I (or they) could do to give my lap top a sort of 'service' like you would a car engine, he said, because it is 6 yrs old, and wasn't designed for Windows 10, nor all the video platform calls it is trying to make, nor trying to connect to wifi all of its life etc, then there was nothing they could do - it was just too old.
However, as I am publicly funded, they work on the principle that wasting the time of every single lap top user every day whilst waiting for it to 'not respond' is apparently cheaper than providing us with equipment that works.

So I'd say 6 years is TOO old

If you do a Windows reinstall on it every now and again - just every couple of years - it should last for ages.

If it's old enough to be running off a spinning hard drive, spending £50 on replacing that with an SSD will actively speed it up. You'll want someone geeky around to do that though, whether you or someone else.

If it has 4gig of RAM, getting that up to 8 will also give it a new lease of life.

If it's running Windows 7 or 8, upgrading it to Windows 10 will speed it up.

(I'm currently using a 2009 MacBook Pro and a 2014 Thinkpad - both upgraded to 8gig/SSD, both still running nicely)

Mine's just turned 10 (It was a graduation present). It's had the hard drive replaced though and the touch screen doesn't work anymore.
It can still run stats packages though which need a lot of processing power though so I'm keeping it for now.