What is a computer year?

The common wisdom says a dog lives to about age 10 while the human lifespan is around 72 which is how someone arrived at the notion that a "dog year" is equal to 7 human years.  So I got to wondering the other day what a "computer year" might be.  It doesn't do any good to look at individual computers any more than it does to look at individual dogs or people.  It's the aggregate average that makes most sense.

I Googled "How long should a computer last" and then checked out several of the suggested web sites and saw answers anywhere from 3 to 10 years.  The sites that justified their answers usually indicates that it makes a great difference how your life is impacted if the computer goes down - temporarily or permanently.  If it's a minor inconvenience because you rarely use the computer or have a second computer available then you can wait longer than somebody whose livelihood depends on 100% computer availability.  But that still leaves us with needing to look at the aggregate.

Therefore, I was delighted to see at http://www.geeksugar.com/How-Long-Have-You-Had-Your-Computer-663253 the following graph:

How long have you had your computer?

Less than 1 year

21%(152)

1-3 years

47%(340)

4-5 years

20%(147)

5-10 years

9%(67)

Too long to remember

2%(15)

Total votes: 721

I'm told that a polling size of 3,000 would be the lowest number to be really representative but this isn't bad.   And what do we see in this graph?  An almost perfect bell curve indicating that the most likely age of a computer is 1 to 3 years. So the expected life of a computer is around 2 years even if many, many computers last for 5, 10 and even more years.  If you want to keep up with the latest software and hardware, you need to replace your computer sometime between 2 and 3 years.