What's your Computer's Shelf Life?

I’m a software engineer, an innovation one who works in cutting edge high performance computing. Composing music is a hobby for me and generally speaking modern music software places almost no real demands PC processor except the real time performance aspect - those pesky VI’s you are actually live playing.
I say this so you know where I am coming from when I talk about PC performance → Unless something breaks, there is no real reason to upgrade a computer for music purposes. It if its working for you, just keep going with it until it breaks, or you fancy a new one. Even breaking is likely to be cause by a driver no longer being supported rather than physical hardware over a 10 year period.

When I was younger, that’ll be 30+ years ago, I used to upgrade every 18 months. Even at the computer prices back then it was cost effective to do it for work because the performance difference due to clock speed was so much greater. For the last 15 years a performance reason for an upgrade has not existed and my upgrades are now 7 years apart for PC based workloads (like running Cubase). The performance difference just isn’t that great. Note that with music systems, performance isn’t directly proportional to increasing core count which is where modern processors need to go to increase available performance (clock speed increase is now very difficult to achieve in a meaningful way cause quantum mechanics…). Of course if you were video editing or primarily loading up a lot of tracks that ASIO Guard can use then more cores is awesome. But most people on these forums note the extra cores aren’t as well used as they expected.

Bottom line, if you are happy with performance, it works, and the drivers are still working for you - no need to upgrade IMHO.