laptops have such a fucking high obsolescence rate though... hell, a 1000 buck laptop 2 years ago is barely worth replacing a video card in anymore, as you said people just junk them. I picked up a nice HP from an old coworker and went to replace the video card and resell it, wasnt even worth the price of the card alone. I junked it rather than trying to flip it.
I guess it all depends on how old the thing is. I have replaced many HP video cards for less than $50 bucks with a little added heat sync protection. Usually good to go for another 7 years. I started this in 2000.
Anything older than that could be the suck.
If I can't upgrade, then yeah, trash it is. I'm a huge fan of 7. Not so much of Vista. XP pretty much ain't worth wasting my time even though I love the program. If it's still fixable (broken connection or something stupid like that) I'll keep it.
I'm not really trying to make money flipping these things, I just love having them.
Built my own Desktop strictly for video editing. It's a frickin' powerhouse. Heats up the whole room when clips are rendering. I use Adobe Premier Elements 8 and it sucks A LOT of power! This thing cost me about 4 bills to put together. If I wanted to buy one at Best Buy of equivalent size and power, I woulda paid almost 3 K ~
It all depends. If you have a Desktop PC that is old as hell, I'll still take it just for parts. Other than that most of it will indeed be obsolete. No high speed USB ports, obsolete hard drives, software, the power of a broken Honda...