You honestly don’t need a ton of horsepower to perform most computing tasks. Even old and entry-level PCs can stream 1080p video, sling email, and speed through Office documents like a pro. Browsing Amazon isn’t exactly taxing.

Also consider that processor performance increases have trailed off dramatically over the years. Back in the day, CPU performance could leap by 30-plus percent year over year, but in the past decade that torrid advance has slowed considerably. New processors tend to be only 5 to 10 percent faster than their predecessors, and clock speeds have largely remained stagnant.

“You can hold onto your PC five, six, seven years with no problem. Yeah, it might be a little slow, but not enough to really show up [in everyday use]," Linley Gwennap, the principal analyst at the Linley Group, told PCWorld in 2013.