Some thoughts on this:

- Make sure that RAM, wifi card, battery and HDD/SSD are all replaceable, not soldered to the board.

- Try to get a common model so that spares will be available for a while

- Also you might pre-emptively buy spares for the things which usually fail. Especially battery.

- Preferably run Free Software and do as much computing as possible locally on it. Avoid SaaS whose system requirements will increase over time.


I refurbished a netbook the other day, so it is possible to still run decade old technology and for it still to be useful. The netbook runs faster and takes less RAM today than originally when it was new, due to the software advances in Linux and window managers.