When do you upgrade?

[Ssin]

I update when I feel my applications and games force me to. Let's say that's about every 1.5 / 2 year.

[Nuno]

That´s an hard question. I do regulary buy new pieces of hardware, I only remember buying a whole new computer from scratch when I sold my P200MMX/Millenium/m3d to get a celeron300a/BX6/G200. New box (ATX) and everything

I can say that the longest survivors on my current system are a CDRW/DVD combo, a Seagate barracuda 40Gb and a ECS K7S5A. The video card went from a KyroII to a GF4 and finally to a R9700; the cpu from a XP1600+ to 2400+, sb live! to audigy, added a pci USB2.0 and a NIC card, 256 Mb SDRAM at first, replaced with 256Mb DDR and added later 256MB more.

I can say I upgrade when I feel the urge to It´s a hobby.

[Byock]

It depends, when new games come out, and I can't play them smoothly, then it is time.

[Indiana]

Hey, where's that "All of the time" option?

[Pace]

I upgrade all the time, but I plan to bring it to a halt. You begin to notice the upgrade process less. Although it seems nicer on the wallet, incremental upgrading just doesn't seem to have the 'wow' factor.

So, I will hopefully be able to let my current system drive itself into the ground before upgrading

I was similar to KvH, moving from P120 to P2-350 to P3-800 (which is where it slowed down) to XP2000+ (1.7GHz). The P2-350 remains my best ever upgrade, so I plan to echo this with a 5Ghz Pentium whatever

Hmm...cannot wait that long...must buy faster...must buy now...

[efty]

I usually upgrade every 4-5 years depending on my financials and the need for an upgrade. I usually complement the system with a bit more memory and HD space as required. I am not a gamer so my main concern is the applications that I run, some of which can be very cpu intensive but mainly require a lot of memory. I actually started from a 386sx16Mhz with 1Mb ram 40mb HD, then jumped to a P90Mhz 8mb ram (later upgraded to 16) and 1 gb HD and then to a PII300@450 with 128 Mb ram and 8gb HD, later upgraded memory to 512mb and 40gb hd along with another 20gb one. My computer runs pretty fine but I think some of the components started showing their age especialy my matrox marvel which only has some basic functionality on winxp.

I will not upgrade any time soon even though I considered doing so a few months ago.

[Marshmallowman]

usually 1 to 2 years, but for the last year or so AMD chips have been so cheap and priced at in such away, that I have been able to upgrade almost every 3 months or so for next nothing.....

Duron 750(@980),1.4(@1500)GTBird,1500xp, 1800xp(palmino@2100)... and I will probably get a 1800xp in the next month or so a 1800(Tbred) that will run at 2400 that is