When does a PC get old? Busting the myth of PC gaming being too expensive

As an example I will use my own hardware, a laptop with an 8th gen I7, nvidia GeForce MX130 and 16GB of RAM. While it is outdated, at its lowest setting it can run most games, for example Red Dead Redemption 2, Days Gone, Cyberpunk 2077. You can also expand the game library by emulating retro video game consoles. When it comes to emulation it runs Nintendo switch games and some light Playstation 3 games for example Killzone HD, Killzone 2 and Killzone 3, while it struggles with games like God of War 3, and The Last of Us. If you plan on using that PC just for gaming you might want to play around with different Operating Systems especially if you are mostly going to emulate retro video game consoles. Batocera is great for retro gaming, it comes with a huge number of consoles to emulate and you just have to provide game ROMs and sometimes console’s bios or firmware, While it mainly emulates consoles you can still play some old PC games, on top of that you can add emulators, change themes and it has a large and active community ready to answer any questions you might have,not to mention how controller friendly it is. If besides gaming you are gonna use it for school or work, you might want to check out bazzite or ChimeraOS, bazzite is good if you want a steam OS experience, it comes pre installed with proton and wine and you can use lutris to install other launchers like epic games, ubisoft connect. And if you plan on playing newer games where every FPS is valuable, you might want to stick to windows. If you really want to play the newest games, but your PC can't run it and you have a decent internet connection, you can use streaming services like boosteroid, GeForce Now, Xbox cloud gaming… You can also take a little bit of time from your gaming sessions and write some articles, post those articles here, and make YouTube shorts about it, you can also save a few bucks by instead of buying games from steam, buying them on sites like instant gaming. You can also stream older games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. If setting up emulators seems complicated, or you want controller friendly interface similar to batocera, but you don't want to change Operating System, you can try EmuDeck, it installs and sets up emulators for you, while adding games to your steam library, essentially turning steam’s big picture mode into an emulation frontend. If you think it is time to upgrade, but you do not want to waste so much money, you can look into buying a handheld gaming PC, like a steam deck, for the price of one GPU you can buy two steam deck OLEDs with 1 TB of storage and still have a 100 dollars left or 1 steam deck OLED 1 TB, and 800 dollars left, Steam Deck allows you to run good amount of modern games, and is an emulation powerhouse