I bought a custom machine my brother was sick of in 2009. First gen Core i7-940. I sold it off to a friend in 2021. It had only received GPU upgrades over the years because the 3 channel RAM architecture and boosting RAM clock from 1066 to 1600MHz yielded huge bandwidth over most newer machines for a long time. CPU clock was also boosted from 2.9GHz to 3.85GHz.
It had a GeForce 285 when I bought it. I gave it a Radeon HD5870 I bought for $200 and replaced a sheared-off capacitor to get the card working again. I bought a GTX 1080 FE card to run VR. Sold that off when money was tight. Bought a GTX 1070 later and that was the card in it when I sold it. No complaints.
I bought a used ThinkPad W500 in 2011. I implanted an Xbox 360 controller receiver in it in 2011, adding a u.fl connector to the receiver and implanting a wifi antenna from another machine. Controller range was well over 100 feet, fwiw.
I used that machine heavily until 2020 when I gave it to my kid (getting into video editing). It was too heavy for my needs and the battery wasn't reliable. I had already switched to a ThinkPad T420 by that point.
When the T420 display hinges broke, I lucked into a ThinkPad W540 for $100 with a docking station. I didn't need so much mobility during COVID lockdown so it was a good compromise. It was a 2014 model. I stopped using it earlier this year (2023). It had been through an SSD upgrade, battery replacement, and the display developing a progressive glitch on the right side after something got wedged in while closing one day. That something dented the keyboard, whatever it was. I fixed the dent, but the display had to be positioned "just so" to avoid glitching on the rightmost portion.
Being sick of messing around with it, I started shopping and bought a Dell G15 on sale. This was only the fourth/fifth laptop I had ever bought new. The first one was a Toshiba Satellite 2805-S603 in late-2001 and it was a display model so not really new. First truly new was a Lenovo IdeaPad 1i in 2023 I returned because it sucked (eMMC is slow and the RAM was stuck at 4GB), followed by an IdeaPad 3i that I kept and use as my workhorse (NVMe sSSD slot, 4GB RAM stock, open SODIMM socket I snapped 16GB into for 20GB total).
Third was a Dell G15 I bought on sale. Good machine, other than the dogshit display and the gatekeeping that left out Thunderbolt for RTX 3050Ti systems when RTX 3060 had it. Otherwise, i7-12700H, 16GB DDR5, 512GB NVMe SSD... Good rig with Alienware DNA based on the motherboard silkscreen. I returned it.
My refund hit right when the Dell President's Day sale did. Looking through options, I found a G16 I wished I had ordered in place of the G15 (added the RTX 3060, Thunderbolt 4, better display (2560x1600 vs 1080p plus legit fast refresh) and doubled the SSD to 1TB. It cost a couple hundred more, but had what I wanted, plus a bigger battery. Fortunately, I decided to look at what else was available. Glad I did.
Another hundred dollars would buy me an Alienware M15 R7 with the best display available (2560 x 1440 3ms), the Alienware lighting effects (G16 was single color vs per-key), and a second NVMe SSD socket(!). Two SSDs?! Sold!
I already had a 4TB SSD stick and 64GB RAM kit ready (both intended for the G15) when she arrived. Both went in without a single problem. The original 1TB SSD went in my IdeaPad 3i as an upgrade to the stock 128GB SSD.
Since mobility is crucial to my life right now, but severely compromising performance isn't an option, this machine is going to be with me for a long time. Aftermarket battery availability has always been a concern.
I had an Alienware M9700 back in 2007 (from same Brother who sold me the desktop rig) and couldn't get a replacement battery since this was pre-"Dell-ienware" with Arima being the manufacturer.
Fortunately, I can definitely get replacement batteries since so many models use the same packs.
I expect to use this machine for many years.
Sidenote: I bought a 1992 Toshiba T1850 back in 1997 and it was still going in 2012 when I couldn't justify keeping it.