I mean, if we're giving anecdotes, I bought a Dell laptop in 2006, refurbished for something like $600. I was able to upgrade it over the years all the way to Windows 10 (I think I paid $40 for the Windows 7 upgrade at one point). The only thing that failed for me on that machine was the built-in wifi. I only ended up getting rid of it two years ago because I really had no use for it, and had long since replaced both my laptop and my desktop machines by then.
Topically - it was at one point driving my television off this old E1505 and got a 2010 Mac Mini as a Christmas present, and hooked that up instead. Netflix and Hulu chugged on the Mac Mini, which also locked up for no reason from time to time. I literally installed nothing but Flash, for playing back videos.
Hulu and Netflix ran without hiccups or lag on the 2006 Dell laptop, so we put the laptop back.
Around 2010, Flash on anything other than Windows was notoriously craptastic -- to the point that Apple refused to support Flash in their mobile browser.
Nowadays, that same 2010 Mini could probably stream Netflix reliably, since it'll be decoding HTML5+DRM instead of Flash.
Yup, I have a 2009 core 2 duo mac mini and it does netflix just fine thanks to html5 video. It still does everything I need reliably (web browsing, non-vm web dev, ms office), but I will upgrade to the new mini and hand this one off to the kids.
Topically - it was at one point driving my television off this old E1505 and got a 2010 Mac Mini as a Christmas present, and hooked that up instead. Netflix and Hulu chugged on the Mac Mini, which also locked up for no reason from time to time. I literally installed nothing but Flash, for playing back videos.
Hulu and Netflix ran without hiccups or lag on the 2006 Dell laptop, so we put the laptop back.