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.
Hey aren’t you that knife nerd?!
You’ll never pin a single thing on me, copper.
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.
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!
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.
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?
…maybe lmao
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.
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).
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.
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!
Or german
Swedish; it’s an ikea commercial from, idk, fifteen or twenty years ago iirc
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
:( he looks so sad
To me, it looks sad and in pain and later happy, but still in pain.
That’s what I’m seeing too. It hurts, but he’s glad to have the sense of purpose.
Repost already?
The only computer I have is a 12 year old laptop, it sounds like a jet engine if I try to play a 1080p youtube video, though local 1080p files mostly work fine. I use Shadow for gaming, creative work and anything else that just doesn’t work locally and it’s crazy how good it is, it never spins the fans much more than its idle speeds when streaming and the input delay is crazy low, unnoticeable 99.99% of the time. Even though I’ve used this for thousands of hours it still feels like some sci-fi fantasy.
Maybe YouTube isn’t using hardware acceleration, which browser?
My wife’s 10-15? Year old laptop came in clutch last year. I had a guitar-Bluetooth pedal that needed a firmware update and the software wouldn’t run on anything but windows 7 lol
I dont care if your wife’s laptop is a year old, you shouldnt marry minors and you should definitely know her age for sure, you sick fuck.
Ooooh okay, I see what you did there
Whoa hey man, he gave us a range! Next thing we know you’ll be demanding he know her name and have met her parents or something crazy like that.
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.
My 9 year old laptop is currently sitting in two pieces… But only because I wanted to pull the hard drive out for easier transferring of old files I wanted to keep.
When I get back to the main part, I’ll be removing 90% of the apps on it, doing everything I can to make it run better, and it will be my hobby shop computer. It was going back and forth between my game room and the garage where I kept my lasers and printers.
If and when it finally bites the dust, it will be given a place of honor amongst the modern tech. Like a transparent top coffee table with all the parts disassembled and arranged inside.
I’m weirdly nostalgic about my electronics.
Pretty much what i do with my old desktop since coming out here in the data blackhole zone. That and play old arcade games
My laptop is around 7 years old now. Still going strong.
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.
Gnome isn’t really bloated either. I’ve seen people run Gnome on a T400 (2008)
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
My Thinkpad would laugh at this
thinkpeak gang rise up
im right here!
Yo!
I have an old lightweight laptop that I use for youtube videos from time to time.
Page loads take 3-10 seconds. Video decoding, once it gets going, is great due to dedicated MPEG hardware. But the site itself - well, old man gets there eventually.
Edit: already stripped overhead to the bone by running Bodhi Linux. I may try FF over Chromium in case there’s more performance to be had. But the 2GB RAM footprint is really pushing it these days.
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.
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.
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