Yeah, the 18 month cycle tends to be work related. I tend to run more like 3+ years for personal laptops. Even so, once I've used a machine for a few years, it

Yeah, the 18 month cycle tends to be work related. I tend to run more like 3+ years for personal laptops. Even so, once I've used a machine for a few years, it tends to feel like sending good money after bad to "upgrade" a 2+ year old laptop. At that point I wind up using them for odd jobs (e.g. print server, media server) rather than my primary computer.