Next month is my desktops CPU model’s 10th birthmonth. Still my default computer.
Absolutely, a ten year old computer today is still capable of doing pretty much everything that most people use computers for. It’s not like the old days when every few years a new tier of computer would come out that made older devices no longer capable of doing what people wanted.
“By the time you see it on the shelf, it’s already obsolete“
I ‘member
It’s all about the pentiums, baby!
Throw the snacks in the bag!
I was still running a Q6600 (a 2.4 gHz quad core from 2007) until a few years ago. It ran most things acceptably for its entire life - it wasn’t until around the time of PS4 Pro/Xbox Whatever ports that it could no longer keep up, and even that was largely due to the other components I was restricted to on such an old motherboard.
That thing was also a tank. The CPU cooler was stock and the thermal paste had degraded and separated to the point it idled at 65c, but I never had a single hardware fault in nearly fifteen years of running it. I kind of miss it.
i had a q9xxx on an x38. i had it overclocked to keep up and it did no sweat for a good while there.
by the time i sold it an old computer collector was buying it from me hahaha.
It depends on how good it was to start with. I have a machine from 2006 that is usable for daily tasks. I also have a netbook from 2009 that can barely do anything.
One hit 12 before I retired it… and now it’s a network file and web server.
Yup. My old gaming rig is now quietly humming away in the basement as my dedicated media server.
My Laptop will be 15 years old this year.
It was running Vista when I bought it, then upgraded to Win 7, and now runs whatever flavor of Linux I feel like installing.
Battery is shot. Screen connection is iffy, but works if you wiggle it. Several keys stopped working after I accidentally threw up on it, but I can use an onscreen keyboard for those.
Still runs fine. She’s a trooper.
I’m not one to kink shame, but anyone who throws up on a laptop on purpose needs help.
I’m guessing alcohol. I had a friend throw up on a 20 year old laptop and that finally killed it.
You guessed correctly.
I was pulling an all-nighter reading fan fiction serials while drinking Kraken mixed with Orange Juice and had also eaten a whole frozen pizza around midnight. I was not ok. The incident happened around 3am.
First time I’d ever vomited while drunk. I know my limits better now.
You feel sorry for ze little old computer. Zis is because you crazy. It is just a machine; it has no feelings.
It is working just as well as it was 10 years ago and capable of all the same things now as it was back then. Nothing has changed except your expectations of it. That’s right, there’s nothing wrong with it – in reality, you’re the problem.
You monster.
Not really. As it’s been updated over the years with new features the OS has heavier usage on the hardware. Also if it’s still got a hard drive in there chances are it’s dying after 10 years
Running an OS significantly newer than original on a computer gets filed under “expectations.” Nobody bitches their Amiga can’t run Windows 98, either. If it is 10 years old, its original OS was Windows 8, updates for which ended in 2016 (or last year, for Windows 8.1). No new bloat after that!
But even so, unless the computer in question is a netbook or something it’ll be fine. For reference, I have a ThinkPad laptop that was manufactured in 2012 and I still use it daily. It runs Windows 10 just fine. Updates and all. The latest Corel suite, modern browsers, video editing, no problem. PC performance reached a bit of plateau coincidentally… about 10 years ago.
The MTBF of even a middling consumer hard drive is, if we are being extremely uncharitable, 300,000 hours. That’s 32 and a quarter years of continuous usage and there are vintage hard drives in circulation in perfect working order that are much, much older than that. The main thing this laptop is going to need help with is its battery, which probably is degraded a bit by now.
I need a moment to process the fact that Windows 8 was 10 years ago
But even so, unless the computer in question is a netbook or something it’ll be fine. For reference, I have a ThinkPad laptop that was manufactured in 2012 and I still use it daily. It runs Windows 10 just fine. Updates and all. The latest Corel suite, modern browsers, video editing, no problem. PC performance reached a bit of plateau coincidentally… about 10 years ago.
even then you could just install something like linux on it, and it would probably be lighter than win7 which is what likely shipped with that machine, though i think some sported windows 8 later in the cycle.
need help with is its battery, which probably is degraded a bit by now.
Kingsener is your friend…
Also, if windows bloat is bringing your old friend to its knees, time for linux!
As it’s been updated over the years with new features the OS has heavier usage on the hardware.
windows skill issue.
Also if it’s still got a hard drive in there chances are it’s dying after 10 years
too bad they soldered those to the motherboard in a ball and grid arrangement type deal, those suck to remove…
This is kind of like buying a car and not changing the oil and tires and being mad when it totals and kills your family on the highway.
Well actually, electronics age just like the rest of us, every electron that passes through wears down the component just a little more creating just a little more resistance with each passing use. So in effect the 10 year old laptop does have something resembling getting harder and harder to wake up
Did you just make that up on the spot?
The name to google is “electromigration”.
It’s absolutely not what makes you old computer slow (neither are bad capacitors). But it may be what makes it stop working.
have there been like studies on this? Or anything that shows any sort of relevant data about it? I’ve been curious what effect it has on manufactured stuff like this for a while now.
But that is not caused by “every electron” and only happens under very specific conditions.
Assuming that the software updates haven’t slowed it down and that it’s been kept clean of dust (which also causes it to throttle itself to avoid overheating).
It is working just as well as it was 10 years ago
Not if it’s running Windows.
Hello. Why are you French? Thank you!
this comment is fucking brutal dude, i love it.
Or german
Swedish; it’s an ikea commercial from, idk, fifteen or twenty years ago iirc
Hey aren’t you that knife nerd?!
You’ll never pin a single thing on me, copper.
in reality, you’re the problem.
NO, IT’S THE TECH INDUSTRY, NOT ME, I’M PERFECTLY FINE!
Idk man, in my experience laptops break down a hell of a lot faster than PCs
my 13 years old laptop works good as server. Sometimes he fell asleep when I watch a movie with Jellyfin but it’s okey.
Yeah, I have a 5-year old and a 15-year old laptop downstairs acting as servers, and they are runnjng GREAT.
I’m using my old laptop as a PleX server. It does pretty well. It has a GTX1050 in it, so not too bad. Saves me having to put real hardware in my NAS
a gtx1050 is so much better than any gpu ive ever had lmao
The mobile GPUs aren’t quite as impressive as the desktop counterparts.
That’s pretty wild tbh, it’s old. I got it for gaming back in the day before I had a desktop.
i do live in brazil so its hard to get good hardware because os shipping and everythings supposed to be around 5x more expensive than stuff in the us (though in practice, its way worse than that)
my brother got lucky and got an rtx 2060 super at the end of the pandemic. the best gpu ive ever had was a gtx750 ti that simply stopped working, meaning im now stuck with no gpu, an i5 6500 and 16GB of ram (my brother got himself more ram and sold a 16GB stick to me that he was using)
5x more expensive
So, a number of countries, including Brazil, have VAT, which is considerably higher than US sales tax. Looking online, it looks like Brazil has 17%-19% VAT, and sales tax in the US, aside from a few states that don’t have it, is usually in the 6%-9% range.
And I can believe that for some products, maybe localization for Portuguese costs something, and economy of scale is less.
But how can it possibly be 5x? That seems far higher than anything that I could imagine producing. Some countries have protective tariffs to subsidize local industry, but I’m pretty sure that Brazil isn’t big in the PC hardware business.
googles
Okay, this is a decade old. They cite other taxes as some of that:
https://thenextweb.com/news/from-brazil-cost-brazil-profit-why-electronics-expensive-Brazil
Taxation is a recurring theme when you ask Brazilians about the cost of many imported goods. To take an example, the Brazilian website iG published an infographic on Apple products’ tax burden, and noted that the different taxes hitting the iPad add up to almost 55%.
So, that’s pretty hefty. Still not 400%, though.
This is where ‘Lucro Brasil’ (“Profit Brazil”) comes into play. Coined in reference to ‘Custo Brasil,’ it denounces the fact that structural problems often hide abusive margins at all levels, which most Brazilian consumers aren’t aware of.
While it is always difficult to find out about distributors’ and manufacturers’ margins, several details seem to confirm this suspicion. For instance, 60% taxes don’t fully explain why items can be twice as expensive in Brazil, and why tax breaks take so long to be reflected, Gizmodo Brasil highlighted in a recent article.
Okay, but why higher margins?
According to many analysts, the Brazilian elite may have its share of responsibility here. In practical terms, a high price tag has become a selling point for some, the anthropologist Roberto da Matta explained in an interview:
“When I was living in the US, I was running once when I saw then president George W. Bush, running as well, with security guards. He was using the same Nike shoes as I was. Here in Brazil, it’s hard to picture such a scene. Because objects still very much reflect the social segment of their owners. The sneakers, the car, the restaurant aren’t valued only for what they are, but also as status symbols. This is why it is more expensive to have dinner in Rio or São Paulo than in New York.”
I could maybe buy that for luxury goods – that’s a thing, Veblen goods, but I don’t think that most computer hardware probably qualifies.
Martin’s comment is a reference to reports that Foxconn is now manufacturing Apple products in its Brazilian plants – a piece of news that didn’t have any major impact on their price tags.
Hmm. That might be an argument that protectionist policy is involved.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/brazil-is-among-the-worlds-most-expensive-countries-to-buy-an-iphone/
Brazil is among the world’s most expensive countries to buy Apple products, according to a new report looking at 20 countries worldwide, published by bank BTG Pactual.
The prices of imported electronics in Brazil are among the highest of the countries listed in the report and are justified the argument that the Latin country is a “tough environment for foreign players”, who have to deal with “challenging and structural issues.”
Such problems include high import taxes, complexities and bureaucracy for imports and bottlenecks around logistics. According to the report, that means players with local manufacturing operations will get the upper hand in the years to come.
Yeah, that’s specifically referencing imports too.
At least for me, both my laptop (daily driver) and desktop would be considered old by this comic (2014 and 2017 respectively). Neither of them are struggling with the tasks I mostly use them for (writing notes, programming, light gaming on my desktop).
The only things they are struggling at, are modern video codecs and the ABSOLUTELY BLOATED shitshow that is today’s Internet experience.
If you use an ad blocker it’ll speed up your web performance dramatically
I am already using uBO on Firefox on both machines, as well as a Pi-Hole on my network for devices unable to obtain adblockers.
to be fair, everything struggles with software decoding on modern HEVC codecs (yes i realize HEVC is technically H265 but that’s a stupid fucking name, and i refuse to use HEVC and AVC as anything other than generics for the class of codec they’re in because that’s the only thing that makes sense)
And the internet, so like. None of this is “new”
My 2012 desktop PC died the other day.
I took out all her parts and determined that the fault was with the power supply and with a wonky pci shield on the wifi card. Replaced the psu and straighten the shield with pliers, reapply thermal compound for fun, and bam, shes back.
Its an i73770k lga1155 socket, with 16g DDR3 RAM. They dont make lga1155 sockets anymore, or DDR3 ram, so I would have been out $1600 to replace the CPU, motherboard, and RAM.
But now, she might have another 5 years in her yet. Im determined to keep her around until she’s old enough to vote at least.
My laptop will be old enough to vote next year
I’m pretty sure you could get a full brand new desktop that is more powerful for much less than $1600…
Probably, but I wouldn’t settle for something that’s just more powerful, Id want to spend the money to get higher-end current-gen hardware that will last me another 15 years, including upgrading to a good M.2 drive and better GPU. In AUD Id probably be spending at least $2k.
In fact I still have the birth certificate for my current PC, and I spent $1500 on it in 2012 dollars.
Windows Laptop: “Sure, no problem, just let me install all these updates first. Why don’t you go ahead and create a Microsoft account?”
This is one benefit of still using Windows 7
Ten year old laptop is 2013 (this post seems to be from 2023). That’s really not old at all. I use a 17 year old machine and it works great for basic tasks.
17? As in 2007? What are the specs on that thing? You running a lightweight linux distro on it? Surely you have an SSD in there and have upgraded the ram.
It’s a ThinkPad T61 running Gentoo. I upgraded it to 4GB of RAM and an SSD. Works fine with 10 browser tabs and youtube
linux on an ssd without a DE goes hard as fuck on anything that has no beans in it what so ever.
WM are the shit.
I can run KDE just fine on a ThinkPad T61 from 2007
It’s interesting how light KDE has gotten. It used to be the big, bloated desktop environment that you wouldn’t even try using on old hardware. It seems to have traded places with GNOME.
Gnome isn’t really bloated either. I’ve seen people run Gnome on a T400 (2008)
i have a couple of 11-12 release year thinkpads, they’re super capable, not productivity monsters, but they’re fine.
look at the laptop, he’s so happy.
Just enjoying the tunes, and the light workload, content as can be.
My notebook is 8 years old. It was a gaming beast when I got it, now it’s not great on most modern releases(1060). It still works really good to be honest, I just stopped using once I got a good desktop computer.
Heyo yee old laptop gang. I have a 2011 MacBook Pro that I slapped more ram and a SSD into and it works amazingly. I don’t use it for games anymore (I bought it to install Windows and play games) but it handles like 60k photos wonderfully.
I did that with a 2010 17” MacBook Pro. It had Windows for games and Mac OSX when I wanted a reliable computer. Finally died on me in ~2022 but otherwise was doing fine. I switched to a tower for games in 2018 and now my friend and I(mostly my far more savvy friend) and working out how to make Linux work reliably because Windows is…ya know.
I read about this from people like you, but I did NOT have the same experience.
I recently upgraded a 2011 Pro Macbook with new RAM, and a new battery. I am furious at myself for even wasting the money to do that in the first place.
The battery, even when brand new from iFixit, barely lasted an hour or two on Youtube while I am at work. Two videos around 15-20 minutes, medium brightness, 720p, and the damn thing barely lasted those two videos. God forbid I want to use it for anything after those!
I’m assuming it was because the CPU is way way power hungry, which is okay, but DEFINITELY not usable in real situations. My main point is that my side of this situation was not at all good, and to not waste your money!
Jesus, that’s a terrible experience!
I actually am on my original battery, it only has like 25 or 30 cycles because I only used it to play games so it was always plugged in. Before I installed the SSD, I tested the battery and got through 1.75 playthroughs* of Beetlejuice on full brightness!
The model I have is the early 2011, so it’s got an ancient i7 and a dedicated GPU. On the most recent OSX version it’ll take, the GPU doesn’t appear to be working though… which is fine, because I just use it to browse stuff and store a million pictures.
The battery, even when brand new from iFixit, barely lasted an hour or two on Youtube while I am at work. Two videos around 15-20 minutes, medium brightness, 720p, and the damn thing barely lasted those two videos.
googles
This is a discussion from back when they came out, and it sounds like two hours is maybe about right.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2789298?sortBy=best
Maybe get a 100Wh USB-C power bank? It sounds like you can get USB-C-to-MagSafe adapters.
Replacing the spinning disk hard drive with an ssd will give you a significant increase in battery life. And it’ll also make the machine wildly faster on all tasks that aren’t cpu intensive
With an SSD and enough RAM, I think old machines are more than capable for most basic task
I’ve got an Acer Aspire One from 2008 running Mint that still works fine for web stuff and documents. Plays music too, hut not really video
Hell, I was gaming on a PC from 2013 all the way into 2022 (i5-4670K, 16GB DDR3 1600, and a 770, later upgraded to a 1070). My CPU stopped meeting the minimum requirement for games around 2018-2019, but it was enough to maintain 60 FPS @ 1080p in all but the most demanding titles. If a pile a money didn’t fall in my lap, I’d still be gaming on it today. But now that I’ve experienced 4K 120Hz gaming in HDR with Ray Tracing and DLSS, I could never go back. It was worth building a new PC for HDR and DLSS alone.
My Mac mini serving as a movie server for nine years after retirement. If the movie starts stuttering back out and go back in, works every time.
2008 mbp still working well as my plex server! Ssd really helped it come back to life.
My Thinkpad would laugh at this
thinkpeak gang rise up
Yo!
im right here!
For MacBooks, 10 years is barely broken in. I’ve had MacBook Airs as daily drivers for well over 10 years.
Resale value is great on them too. I sold my 10 year old MBP (after I paid for an Apple cert battery replacement) for close to 50% of what I paid when it was brand new.
Good for you but who pays that much for that old hardware? While many computers run well beyond 10 years, it’s hardly surprising if components break down after that time.
The answer is an emphatic “someone”. It’s a brand-name thing I’d imagine.
My early 2015 MBP is still my daily driver for programming, I will never regret spending so much on an MBP when they last this long. I went through two windows laptops in four years before this one. It is starting to show its age with only 8 GB of RAM, but I’m going to use it until it melts haha
I have a ThinkPad X220 that recently turned 13, with SSD and RAM upgrades, basic maintenance, and Linux it’s still running great for plenty of tasks.
Plus it’s so well built I could probably stick it in a plate carrier and use it as body armour. Doesn’t seem to matter how much it gets dropped or dropped onto, ol’ Thinky keeps on chugging.
I had an x201 that I sold on to pay for my now “current” (ha) OG Thinkpad Yoga. Sometimes I do miss that old brick.
Sure, it only had two point touch instead of 10… But it got 11 hours of battery life with the extended (swappable!) pack, a daylight readable display, built in GPS, a fingerprint reader that actually worked, and if anyone tried to steal your laptop you could just hit them with it.
But it got 11 hours of battery life with the extended (swappable!) pack
The removal of the large and removable batteries from the newer models in the Thinkpad line is one of my major annoyances with Lenovo.
I love my T580, internal and external batteries, quad-core goodness. Many, many years left in it.
All the same, I still hate the US FAA? for limiting laptop batteries to 100Wh, dick move and everyone goes along…
I mean, I don’t know if the 100Wh limitation is specifically reasonable, but I’ve seen lithium battery fires before, and they’re pretty exciting. Fires on airplanes are pretty bad news. They probably had to have some kind of cap.
You can carry an additional 100Wh battery or power bank, which I do, so if laptop vendors would actually make laptops with 100Wh batteries, that’s 200Wh that can be at least with you, albeit not all internal. And you can carry larger powerstations if you aren’t actually flying.
In theory, laptop vendors could do that old Thinkpad route of having batteries that extended outside the case and make them as large as they wanted…you’d just have to fly with a smaller one.
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