That's just because an accountant somewhere decided 5 years was a reasonable average time to write down the value of the PC as an economic asset. Given both the chances of hardware failures and general accounting practices, that probably wasn't unreasonable at the time. But it doesn't mean that the value of a 5-year-old PC has suddenly become zero to a user if it's still working fine.
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That's just because an accountant somewhere decided 5 years was a reasonable average time to write down the value of the PC as an economic asset. Given both the chances of hardware failures and general accounting practices, that probably wasn't unreasonable at the time. But it doesn't mean that the value of a 5-year-old PC has suddenly become zero to a user if it's still working fine.