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.
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.
But that is not caused by “every electron” and only happens under very specific conditions.
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.
…maybe lmao
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.
Electronics most certainly age like you or I. A new off the shelf device will perform measurably better than an identical one with 10 years of wear.
Silicon doesn’t age friend. Heat might degrade circuits and harms processors by thermal deformation. But most electronics are designed to stay well under the temperatures that will harm them with throttling and heat management. So, unless you’re incredibly negligent with maintenance or intentionally overclocking, most electronics have a way longer potential life span than people use them for. My 15 year old desktop computer was so beefy when I build it that today it still outperforms this year’s off the shelf office units in raw speed and processing power, despite being physically about 12 times larger. It’s only recently that new games started to tax it beyond performance goals (60fps at 1080p), but get a lower modest expectation (800p at 30 fps) and suddenly she is back in the game. Only thing I’m missing now is lack of on-board bluetooth connectivity and usb-c ports. Even if I were to build a new one, I bet the old beast could go on as a server for decades more.
That’s lovely. When is the last time you bought an electronic device made entirely of silicon including no capacitors, thermal past, electric motors for fans, etc, etc? Electronics may seem permanent, and yes they have an amazing shelf life, but chips do in fact degrade (see solid state ssds), and you’re held back by your weakest link.
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)
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.
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”
At least he looks like he’s enjoying making music =)
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.
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.
probably? Kde is a little spicy, but i’d be surprised if it wasn’t usable to be honest.
I mean it’s not like I have a choice. If I stop using KDE then Konqi will come to my house at night and kill me in my sleep. I’ve sold my soul to them
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
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.
I have a 14 year old laptop that runs like a top with debian 12 on it.
Same with mine, i’m only still to dumb to get it using the old nvidia gpu instead of the intel graphics. Didn’t take the time yet to look further into it
How about installing Gentoo on it?
Not sure the 0.01s of reduced login time is worth the 30 hours it’ll take to build the kernel.
Why?
no one is seriously going to install gentoo on an old laptopt just to get it slightly faster. Gentoo is for hobbyists
With an SSD and enough RAM, I think old machines are more than capable for most basic task
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.
I’m on a similar train. My old PC can still run around half of new games but I can see the struggle. I’m considering going for a mid to low range laptop with Linux for everyday stuff and move my gaming to a Steam Deck. I ran the numbers and this option is around $750 cheaper than building a new mid level PC the way I want it. Unless I get a big downfall, the Deck+Laptop way is gonna have to do in the next year or so.
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
Thinkpad X230 of my dad still going strong with xfce.
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.
Nice! Mine developed a boot loop error of some kind years ago and never came back. Otherwise, those original Aluminum unibody systems are tanks.
Pfft, I make music with my ten year old laptop.
what kind?
BEEP BOOP BEEP BOOP!
Nailed it
Fruity loops?
Bitwig Studio, sound design and modulation focused DAW, with Linux support, from former Ableton. A recent update does allow it to open FL projects (among others) but I haven’t tested that part.
I recently resurrected an old desktop computer (linux is great for ding this) I had built in 2009. I upgraded the ram to 8Gb, replaced the broken graphics card and installed Gnu Guix using the system crafters install guide. I’m not doing any hardcore gaming so it does everything I need it to do. I have a raid store, jellyfin server, and samba share.
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