There's a lot of people who keep 50 year old computers running. The CPU is usually a non-sequitur. Fans are usually a top failure point, dust accumulation being related and also a problem. Passive components, particularly capacitors, ares a major failure point. Beyond that, the key is environmental conditions. If a board gets wet at all then all bets are off.
The guys keeping 50 year old computers alive are only doing it for nostalgia. It's only been about 15 years that computers have been fast enough that you'd want a 15 year old computer as a daily driver. 20 years ago you'd be looking at a Pentium 4 single-core single-thread which really isn't going to be that useful for much these days. 15 years ago you'd be looking at a core 2 duo. With a ram upgrade and a modern SSD that's more than enough for basic web browsing and medium bitrate streaming on youtube.
I think we're coming to a point where we can start making decisions to buy higher reliability components in general. The entire FBXL network is run off of fanless commercial grade PCs. They run cool (CPU cores are sitting around 30C as I recall) and have few to no moving parts, so while there's a question about the lifespan of the SSD drives or spinning hard drives, there's no doubt in my mind that the computers themselves will be nice and boring, and probably could outlive me assuming there's no problems with capacitors.
The guys keeping 50 year old computers alive are only doing it for nostalgia. It's only been about 15 years that computers have been fast enough that you'd want a 15 year old computer as a daily driver. 20 years ago you'd be looking at a Pentium 4 single-core single-thread which really isn't going to be that useful for much these days. 15 years ago you'd be looking at a core 2 duo. With a ram upgrade and a modern SSD that's more than enough for basic web browsing and medium bitrate streaming on youtube.
I think we're coming to a point where we can start making decisions to buy higher reliability components in general. The entire FBXL network is run off of fanless commercial grade PCs. They run cool (CPU cores are sitting around 30C as I recall) and have few to no moving parts, so while there's a question about the lifespan of the SSD drives or spinning hard drives, there's no doubt in my mind that the computers themselves will be nice and boring, and probably could outlive me assuming there's no problems with capacitors.
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Ooh, and batteries. A leaky battery will take a steel case and motherboard and everything on it with it.