“All I can really do anymore is browse the Internet and maybe stream some music.”
“And that’s enough for me, old friend.”
It’s the opposite for me. Using a modern browser is a real struggle, but running old games, watching DVDs and listening to MP3s? As good as ever!
My Lenovo Y500 laptop from 2012 is still running. Windows 8.1 has surprisingly little memory footprint & runs all my old windows applications. The speakers are pretty much gone & I had to swap my old HDD to a SATA SSD in 2023.
This thing’s bulky, but it never let me down. They really don’t build things like they used to.
Is there any way I could turn this into a sticker (would go on my old ThinkPad T540p)?
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Am I the only one who’s old enough to remember CD-ROMs, and they used to be able to play CDs without an OS running? As long as they get power from the IDE power socket, you can put a CD inside and press on the physical “play” button on the panel of the CD-ROM.
Back in my early help desk days I had a manager tell me to disable the ability to listen to music on her employees computers. She felt they were slacking if listening to music.
Indeed. I tried to run one without an IDE plugged in (just MOLEX) and it didn’t work :/
Do you mean it didn’t play the CD inside? Do you hear it running past the disc-identification phase and idles?
If I remember, I didn’t hear audio on the headphones after plugging them into the port on the front. I was trying to use it as a simple audio CD player.
Oh, yeah! They had a play button next to the tray button, and a headphone jack with a volume wheel. I haven’t thought about those in forever.
Plug your old laptops into your living room TV, buy a wireless mouse/keyboard combo, and you’ve got the ultimate media machine that you have full control over. I always do this whenever I move.
Yeah, but maybe remove the battery if the thing can run without it just on mains power. Leaving a battery plugged in (especially an old one) is not the best idea.
I do have a used ThinkPad what I bought out from my workplace for dirt cheap. Maybe it’s time to look into buying a TV.
I’ve thought about how any old pc would blow all those proprietary devices out of the water with their flexibility to play anything, any format, any source. And I’ve also thought I currently have too many old laptops. No idea how I didn’t put two and two together until your comment. Thank you!
My laptop I bought new in 2012 is running my Jellyfin server. And working great.
Someone else’s old windows 7 laptop for mine. Works perfectly.
I put Linux on mine because Windows 7 quit working on it years ago.
It has Linux now but I don’t know exactly how old it is so I call it by its original os
I’ve got 3 Thinkpad 420s (nice) - released 2011ish - that I got for free last summer. They all run Linux Mint now. One runs Jellyfin, one runs Sonarr and Radarr, one runs Jackett and Transmission. Works great!
This is an upgrade from the 2010 Dell, which was free from a friend with no working screen and missing 5 keys that I had running all of that.
My laptop is 9 years old this summer and it’s an absolute beast. It never gives me any trouble
I have another that’s 7 years old and was crappy from day one
Somebody give that poor thing Linux already! D:
My 12 year old Hackintosh MBP is doing great with Ubuntu. Mid-2014 machine and it’s still my daily driver!
My stock 2016 MacBook is still running strong.
Laptop afterwards: From the moment I understood the weakness of the batch, it disgusted me.
Where there is service, there is life.
I recently revived an old EEEPC 1005P. I put Antix Linux on it and it’s totally usable.
Firefox needed some tweaks (specifically reducing the process count) to make it run somewhat decently. It still doesn’t do Youtube, but it works fine enough for programming in Kate, doing terminal stuff and other simple native apps. Electron apps are a bit of a pain on that thing.
It’s a really nice little on-the-go device that I use to work on my hobby projects on the train when commuting to work. Super small, super light, 8h battery life.
Ah YouTube ain’t worth it anymore anyway.
still rocking the x230 from 2013 😎
got my xps 9560 and enough parts to make her run for another two decades.
Ten years? Up until recently I had a Core2Duo with 1GB RAM running Qobus in as a jukebox in the bedroom. But now he’s gone, off to a better place, where he can finally rest. By which I mean I upgraded to 4GB and installed at a relative’s house running Home Assistant.
I had a Core2Quad with 4GB of RAM as my home server until about 2 years ago. Home Assistant is what finally overloaded it. (I have a fairly large setup with a ton of integrations.)
Upgraded the desktop, now the old desktop is the server. I think it’s already 10 years old.
10? I’m using a 14 year old laptop for school and it gets through it quite well, even the original battery still does 3 hours.
That comic must be 10 years old, because 10 years old laptops these days would be drawn ripped and making pushups
10 years old would be 7th Gen Intel which is perfectly capable.
For anyone else budget conscious: you can get excellent laptops by looking for an 8th gen Intel laptops in pristine condition on eBay for <£150. This will be perfect for daily use, web, office, etc. If you need gaming then get a used Steam Deck OLED. This is suitable computing for a huge number of people’s usecase.
Older thinkpads are still a great deal too. Just have to stick to the actual business ones and not the consumer ones.
If you are in the USA and are on public assistance, then https://pcsrefurbished.com/sales/salesHome is a great place, especially for laptops. My last laptop from here is a HP Zbook 15 Fury G8 with a Nvidia RTX A2000 for $175.
Words of wisdom from my father, an engineer:
“The computer isn’t any slower than the day you bought it. Only your expectations of it have changed.”
This is a lot more true now than it was in the olden days of hard drive fragmentation and rapidly increasing minimum spec requirements. (For instance the computer my family bought in 1996 had a mind blowing 16mb of ram, Win ME released in 1999 with a 32mb RAM requirement.)
It’s not the hardware that’s the issue. The software keeps getting slower and more bloated because most programmers don’t know how to write well optimized code anymore.
No, they definitely do know how to write faster software. They’re just not paid for that. They’re paid to write software faster, that’s all.
That falls under the category of “expectations.” Run software contemporary to your machine and it’ll fly just as fast as it ever did. Go ahead, slap Windows 98 on that bad boy.
My C-64 still boots up instantly, just as it did on day one. Far faster than Windows could ever dream.
Surpised the capacitors havent borked. You are lucky it runs.
10 year old isn’t that old - 20 is the new 10
Fresh OS install can do wonders. Especially if you switch to a lower resource intensive one.
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