I used a laptop made in 2004 that I bought in 2005 as my daily portable driver till 2018 lol. I still have it. It's a Toshiba Portege 3110ct that I added a USB2.0 PCMCIA card to, IDE SSD, and bumped the ram to 192MB. Ran a customized stripped down debian based distribution with a lot of customizing on my part. A USB wifi adapter. Has a 300mhz pentium 2 CPU. Did literally everything I needed on a laptop perfectly fine (ssh sessions, IRC, pandora streaming, light web browsing, note taking etc).

My current laptop is a ~10 year old Dell. Has a 4TB SATA SSD in it, 1TB secondary SATA SSD in the media bay using an adapter. I have two mediabay batteries as well as a BDRW drive I can hotswap whenever. Extended primary battery. 16GB ram, i5-3360 CPU. Express Card slot that I use with several adapters, USB3 ports, onboard gige, WWAN card, Wifi, BT, backlit keyboard..

If you aren't /needing/ the extra grunt of newer chips for gaming, video work, low latency realtime audio work, CAD, etc, or want the absolute best size to battery life possible, then there is no reason to not use an older system.

Oh, it has an NVidia 5200M 1GB discrete GPU as well as the Intel IGP and the NVS has taken a massive overclock without blinking when I do want to game and runs stuff like Minecraft and older AAA and even new independent games at playable frame rates without any issues.

Now, for /work/ I have a newer MS Surface Book that I absolutely adore. The battery life and display and portability are fantastic.

But it is my work laptop. Not personal. I refuse to buy a brand new laptop for home use lol.