I have a 10 year old Dell Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz running Windows 10 being used as a Plex Server. It’s only slow when overtaxed because I haven’t bothered upgrading to 8GB of RAM or replace the hard drive with an SSD.

Luckily it has a gigabit Ethernet port so it can take full advantage of my gig internet.

My Asus UX31A is six years old and still going strong. It's a pity the RAM is soldered in at 4GB but certainly not worth replacing the entire laptop for it. And it wasn't top of the line - about $1300 as I remember.

Perhaps you just haven't really used a windows laptop recently and only remember the old days when Windows laptops really did only have a life span of about 3 years.

Not really, Thinkpads are known for being built like trucks since the 90s.

That’s an issue with windows, not the laptop. I’m happy enough with the Dell XPS and Linux that I have bought 3.

My Windows laptops had a average of 5 years, minimum.

Maybe one should take care about where to service them from?

My Thinkpad x201 from 2011 is doing just fine. Java dev, webdev, IntelliJ Idea and VSCode just flies on it. Yeah, no 4k for you though.