Everything has a life Cycle. Remember your first car? Unless you’re quite new to driving—or quite lucky—your first car is now nothing more than a memory. It had a life cycle, a point-of-no-return, when maintaining it was more expensive than replacing it.

We’re used to replacing our cars every two or three—or ten—years. But our computers? They too have a life cycle. In the past, three years was considered about average for a piece of PC technology. For budgetary reasons, this rarely meant replacing every single piece of equipment once every three years.