your hardware

Folks here don't really love 'puters all that much I guess! I do hate having to spend $ on them when they might only last a few years. I'm custom building one that hopefully will be more future proof, and not crash on me or freeze dozens of times a day when doing simple tasks of tagging music files and re-indexing. I would LOVE if there were affordable 8TB SSD drives. For now I'm settling on a 1TB SSD with an HDD for full nightly system backups, an internal 8TB HDD, backed up to an external Seagate drive (and a third copy of my collection is on a couple drives at work).

As soon as my case arrives today I can get started: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/RhjBP3

I think most small computers are just disposable, but a well built tower PC or server will last a long time.

My main PC is an old Dell Inspiron 547that I got 8 years ago. It's got an AMD Athlon processor. I went ahead and set it up then with W7 Pro 64 bit and maxed the motherboard out on 8 gigs of RAM when it was new with 2 hard drives. Later on I went up to a 7200 RPM big second drive and I had to change out the power supply once but that's it. Did my first bands CD on it and it still is plenty fine as my main stereo.
Built the OS up from scratch and updated it to Win 10.

One thing I have done with my PCs is take it out a couple times a year and dust them out. I just know from work if you keep them clean they run cooler and have less issues.

I've got a couple of full tower cases I bought over ten years ago. They've both had three different mainboards each and are still going. My main tower PC has had the same board for nearly five years now. Incredibly I've used the same monitor for almost 17 years. I will second the tip about blowing the dust out of computers every few months. It really extends the life of the components.

How hot that generation of Pentium processors used to run and how many of their motherboards had issues with capacitors is one reason I got this AMD model back then. My newer Dell that I use for music is a Pentium though. It doesn't have anywhere near the run hours at all, as I mostly only fire it up if I am working on tunes.