Mutteks,
It's certainly possible to have a computer that can last ten or more years I have a 1998 Dell XPS T700R Pentium III 750GHz / 768MB RAM / 30GB and 80GB EIDE HD that can still run Adobe CS3 on XP 32-bit at a respectable speed:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ox41vtmachz1i6p/Dell%20XPS_F%20with%20keybd%20mouse_6.13.12.jpg?dl=0
(Sorry if this is rotated- Dropbox is acting up)
The only time that system ever failed was when Windows 95 suffered it;s periodic registry failures- not a hardware fault.
Use is a relative term as you can compare the demands on a server running continuously for three years- a typical time they're kept in service and that is equal to 26,380 Hours. If your employee works five 8-hour days for ten years, that's equal to 20,800 hours.
To have this reliability, I suggest Xeon processors as these are configured for reliability over a long period and for that reason are found in servers greats and small. I don't know the details of the processes of binning- selection- and configuration, but Xeons do have some features enabled that benefit content creation and calculation and they are in general running at slightly lower clock speeds than i-core series. I have bought quite a number of Xeons used and have had 100% reliability new or used over the last seven years. One Xeon I bought was an X5460 4-core @ 3.16GHz that arrives in a plain businees envelope in one layer of bubble wrap. I paid $25 for it- the new price was $1,550- and that CPU ran in a pair (Dell Precision T5400) up to 20 Hr's /day 6 days a week for 5 years including 3-day continuous rendering all cores without failure. Xeons are tough!
RAM is also very reliable over a long period, but as Kanewolf mentions, mechanical drives are the weakest link. Still, even those can be more reliable than one might think. I have a number of drives that are five to seven years old, though these are not running continuously or every day. I also use enterprise drives- Western Digital RE and Seagate Constellation, so the thing to look for are 5-year warranties. I have two RE4's from 2010 working perfectly and with quite a lot of use. SSD's can have wear on the memory chips, but these have residual sectors and the data is moved to the reserve memory when the sector is failing. Again, I like enterprise ratings and on my current main system use an Intel 730 480GB. The Intel 730 is rated for read /writes of 70GB per day for 5 years. As my rate of use is about 10GB/day, that would equal about 10 years use.
Of course, non one can predict what the programs of 2025 will be like and the demands to run them, but my sense is that especially working with 2D, your colleague should be able to look ahead to ten years' use from a workstation level Xeon system, perhaps with one or two upgrades and possibly replacement of mechanical drives.
If your colleague is using Adobe and /or Autodesk programs, those companies post recommendations for hardware and systems. I'd recommend at the more generous Dell Precision with an 8-core Xeon E5 , 32GB of ECC RAM, M.2 500GB enterprise SSD, 2TB mech'l storage drive, and a Quadro M4000 (8GB). A very good specification could be done with a Xeon E3, except it would be limited to 4-cores and rendering /effect processing would be more GPU -dependent.
Cheers,
BambiBoom
1. HP z420 (2015) > Xeon E5-1660 v2 (6-core @ 3.7 / 4.0GHz) > 32GB DDR3 1866 ECC RAM > Quadro K4200 (4GB) > Intel 730 480GB (9SSDSC2BP480G4R5) > Western Digital Black WD1003FZEX 1TB> M-Audio 192 sound card > 600W PSU> > Windows 7 Professional 64-bit > Logitech z2300 speakers > 2X Dell Ultrasharp U2715H (2560 X 1440)>
[ Passmark Rating = 5064 > CPU= 13989 / 2D= 819 / 3D= 4596 / Mem= 2772 / Disk= 4555] [Cinebench R15 > CPU = 1014 OpenGL= 126.59 FPS] 7.8.15
2. Dell Precision T5500 (2011) (Revised) > 2X Xeon X5680 (6 -core @ 3.33 / 3.6GHz), 48GB DDR3 1333 ECC Reg. > Quadro K2200 (4GB ) > PERC H310 / Samsung 840 250GB / WD RE4 Enterprise 1TB > M-Audio 192 sound card > 875W PSU > Windows 7 Professional 64> HP 2711x (27", 1920 X 1080)
[ Passmark system rating = 3844 / CPU = 15047 / 2D= 662 / 3D= 3500 / Mem= 1785 / Disk= 2649] (12.30.15)