4 ms·

You can browse the web on a ten year old machine just fine.

ElectricalUnion 4y ago
If you limit yourself to sane, 1.0 web simple pages such as Hacker News, sure. If you need to visit anything using unoptimized 100+ MB of Javascript? Good Luck.
- oynqr 4y ago
  Are you trying to tell me that you can't browse the modern web on an Ivy Bridge-era system?
  - doubled112 4y ago
    Either it's not that bad, or people are lacking patience. I have a Phenom II desktop next to me that browses the web just fine. Yes, even YouTube and infinite scrolling pages.
    - tssva 4y ago
      Same here. I have a Phenom II X6 desktop and it has no problem browsing the modern web running either Linux or Windows 10.
    - jcelerier 4y ago
      I'd really like to see that "not that bad". > or people are lacking patience If it's not instant, it's a bug. I guess this mindset explains why modern software tires me so much.. There's absolutely no "patience" to have with machines whose CPUs can process a dozen Wikipedia (text) worth of information per second
      - doubled112 4y ago
        > If it's not instant, it's a bug If only developers felt the same way. I'm also exhausted by a lot of modern software. There's not much I can do about the modern web though. I've learned to be patient. Stockholm syndrome. It was a pretty powerful machine back then - quad core, 16GB RAM, SSD, 1GB GPU. Not a fast machine today by any means, and not my primary machine, but more than adequate for checking email and watching a tutorial on something. Stick to fast software and it is still a decent experience. Is two or three seconds of loading before the 15 minute YouTube video a long time to wait?
  - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
    Yes, remember that the netbook trend died in 2013. A netbook is a Ivy Bridge-era system.
    - doubled112 4y ago
      Those were awful, especially the first gen, but I have fond memories of them since it was the first time young me could afford anything new and shaped like a laptop. The MSI Wind U100 with an Atom N270 CPU would even overclock. It didn't help, but it would do it.
    - oynqr 4y ago
      If that's allowed, you can't browse the web on an Alder Lake-era system.
  - beebeepka 4y ago
    I was on my good old 2500k until 2019. It was perfectly and I only upgraded because I had the itch
- drewzero1 4y ago
  For a 20 year old machine, sure. But any machine that was decent 10 years ago should be at least okay today. My 2008 Thinkpad handles all but the heaviest websites without too much trouble, as long as I don't have too many tabs open at a time.
  - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
    This is a fair point, the machine I am using as a reference was pretty bad at best even when it was new (a 2012 netbook).
  - blacksmith_tb 4y ago
    Agreed, I am using a 2009 Toshiba laptop with Pop! on it, I did some cheap upgrades (maxed RAM to 10GB, used a spare SSD to replace the old HD), it's perfectly usable.
- bragr 4y ago
  How is hacker news a 1.0 website? It's full of JS and dynamic elements. It might be aping the style of 1.0 web but it is very much a web 2.0 site.
  - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
    > It's full of JS 152 lines of sparse JS ammounting to 5kb uncompressed? Not exactly what I would call "full of js". For comparison your average hasty made, JS infested legacy web site there embeds Moment.js - and that by itself is 19kb compressed.
    - bragr 4y ago
      Compared to the size of the site, and the features? Yeah, most of them involve some amount of JS. Besides, HN is all dynamic user generated content, that's the crux of web 2.0.
      - pluijzer 4y ago
        How I perceive it is that web 2.0 is about dynamic loaded content and as far as I know HN doesn't do this but loads static pages from a server just like ye old web 1.0 forum pages would do.
        bragr 4y ago
        If you go off Wikipedia's definition, it's more about user generated content and HN is definitely that. Might not meet your definition of web 2.0, but it meets this one: >A Web 2.0 website allows users to interact and collaborate with each other through social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community. This contrasts the first generation of Web 1.0-era websites where people were limited to viewing content in a passive manner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
        silisili 4y ago
- freemint 4y ago
  Even that might not work. If it came with a succinctly obscure Operating System you run into SSL problems.
pmontra 4y ago
8.5 yo for sure and with Ubuntu. I improved it a little (32 GB and two 1 TB SSDs) but I bet that the original 8 GB + HDD would be OK for browsing. Browsers got faster and that helps compensating sites that got slower.
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  > I bet that the original 8 GB Second source data I collected from the Steam Hardware Survey (that being a biased group with better that average specs) for 2012 seems to point that the "average Steam user" had around 5 GB of system RAM. > HDD would be OK for browsing. Browsers got faster and that helps compensating sites that got slower. I just remembered this article (and that article talks about SSDs, not HDDs!) surprising conclusions, posted in HN a few days ago: https://simonhearne.com/2020/network-faster-than-cache/ https://simonhearne.com/2020/network-faster-than-cache/
- mrob 4y ago
  4GiB is plenty for browsing if you run uBlock Origin and disable Javascript by default.
  - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
    Well, if you don't run uBlock Origin (or bare minimum another less efficient tracker blocker), no amount of RAM can really save you once you cross the threshold of 60+ tabs open.
    - usr1106 4y ago
      If you want to save resources (and that what talking about 2GB machines is) you just don't keep 60+ tabs open. You cannot eat the cake and keep it at the same time. I cannot see how anyone can jump around between 60 tabs every day. If I have more than 10-20 tabs open after a working day I know that the day went in a very unorganized way and I have probably more open tasks than in the morning when I started. It happens because I have plenty of unused RAM on my work machine, but it's nothing I'd defend. Maybe a smaller machine would just force me to organize my work better. Bookmarks are there for organizing stuff one will need at some time later. Keeping tabs open does not seem to serve any special purpose. Unless you want to save cycles to render it again, but I don't remember many pages I would like to use frequently that even a very old PC does not bring up in decent time. The local weather forecast loads rather slowly, but that I want to reload every time I visit it anyway.
srvmshr 4y ago
While clean reinstalling my macOS last month, my recovery partition was lost - and I booted via internet recovery to MacOS Mavericks. Needless to say, I couldn't even sign in with Apple ID via browser or app store because the world has moved on & these browsers can't work on modern webpages. (I had to use my phone concurrently to help me out with downloading rescue stuff & moving via USB or terminal)
- adrianN 4y ago
  Ten year old software is very different from ten year old hardware.
  - srvmshr 4y ago
    The parent (you replied to) discussed the state of browsers The problem with this tiny projects is that you need a web browser. And good luck browsing the web in old PCs [...] As I can imagine now, a lot of things will not run on 10 y.o. hardware once you get limited by the last base OS you could install.
    - JasonFruit 4y ago
      In the context of Linux, ten year old hardware is widely supported, and will not limit what base OS version and software is installable, though its capabilities might affect usability. We're not really discussing OS X here, where planned obsolescence is such a huge factor.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      That's not really a Linux problem as far as I can tell. You can install a five-minute old Debian-testing on 10 year old hardware without too many surprises.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    Main private laptop is an HP elitebook 8440p from 2012 and it works perfectly fine with modern web and streaming, currently running Fedora 36. It came out with a core i7 and it supports up to 16GB of ram. I upgraded it to 12GB a few years ago and an SSD. Caveat: it was a model from the professionnal line, came with free ram slot and is easily disk swappable. The same could not be said of a model from the consumer line that would have had its memory maxed out at 2GB.
wongarsu 4y ago
A good $500 PC [1] 10 years ago seems to have a 2x3GHz Pentium, 4GB RAM and a 500GB HDD. The $1000 PC [2] from tomshardware was a 4x3.4GHz Core i5 with 8GB RAM, a GTX 670 and a 60GB SSD paired with a 750GB HDD. The $1000 still sounds totally adequate for surfing, office use and some light gaming, as long as you invest $20-$50 in a bigger SSD (or have some patience when starting software). Machines like this are still sold, they're just smaller and cheaper now. Even the 2012 $500 PC is probably fine if you upgrade the RAM, and even without that upgrade is not much different from some of the mini-PCs sold today [3] 1: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-pc-overclocking-pc-building,3273.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-pc-overclocking-... 2: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-a-pc-overclock-benchmark,3276.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-a-pc-overclock-be... 3: https://psref.lenovo.com/Detail/ThinkCentre/ThinkCentre_M70q?M=11DT009WGE https://psref.lenovo.com/Detail/ThinkCentre/ThinkCentre_M70q...
- adrianmsmith 4y ago
  Absolutely - I am typing this on a 2012 Windows 7 PC, 8GB RAM and an SSD. CPU has a Geekbench 5 single-core score of 400 or something, i.e. in no way fast. But surfing the web is snappy and the computer works fine.
- cubano 4y ago
  Exactly $499US is all you need even today to get a pretty damn good machine in my book....4.4GHz 12th Gen i5, 4k OLED, 8GB DDR5, 256GB SSD PCIe4.0...from, of all places, Best Buy? Now trust me...Best Buy is pretty much the last place I would look to buy a computer these days, but I have to give them credit for value here even though this system comes with crappy Intel graphics. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-zenbook-14-2-8k-oled-laptop-intel-evo-platform-12th-gen-core-i5-processor-8gb-memory-256gb-ssd-ponder-blue-ponder-blue/6494331.p?skuId=6494331 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-zenbook-14-2-8k-oled-lapto...
- cardiffspaceman 4y ago
  I’m a fan of 10-year-old hardware. In 2012 I was handed an i7 3770 with 8 GiB of RAM and a git URI for WebKit and told go forth and port! I think the box cost $750 and I know it ran the latest Debian. This machine is still my daily use machine with today’s latest Debian, more HDD, some SSD for ccache, and triple the RAM. The original configuration was so nice I bought a duplicate for home use. That one has had its video card upgraded and the HDD replaced with SSD, it gets used somewhat differently. The graphics upgrade was to match it to a 21x9 screen I splurged on. And it runs Windows 10 decently enough.
jsjohnst 4y ago
Heck, the first gen retina MBP is now 10 years old. It’s definitely still a very capable machine, albeit the Nvidia GeForce 650M GPU is a bit underwhelming, even for non-gaming.
focusedone 4y ago
I'm forcing myself to get better at linux using a 16 year old laptop. I expected its age to be the second biggest irritation (after my ingorance), but really it's fine. A tiny bit slower than I'm used to, but for most of what I use it for, it's shockingly capable.

If you limit yourself to sane, 1.0 web simple pages such as Hacker News, sure. If you need to visit anything using unoptimized 100+ MB of Javascript? Good Luck.

oynqr 4y ago
Are you trying to tell me that you can't browse the modern web on an Ivy Bridge-era system?
- doubled112 4y ago
  Either it's not that bad, or people are lacking patience. I have a Phenom II desktop next to me that browses the web just fine. Yes, even YouTube and infinite scrolling pages.
  - tssva 4y ago
    Same here. I have a Phenom II X6 desktop and it has no problem browsing the modern web running either Linux or Windows 10.
  - jcelerier 4y ago
    I'd really like to see that "not that bad". > or people are lacking patience If it's not instant, it's a bug. I guess this mindset explains why modern software tires me so much.. There's absolutely no "patience" to have with machines whose CPUs can process a dozen Wikipedia (text) worth of information per second
    - doubled112 4y ago
      > If it's not instant, it's a bug If only developers felt the same way. I'm also exhausted by a lot of modern software. There's not much I can do about the modern web though. I've learned to be patient. Stockholm syndrome. It was a pretty powerful machine back then - quad core, 16GB RAM, SSD, 1GB GPU. Not a fast machine today by any means, and not my primary machine, but more than adequate for checking email and watching a tutorial on something. Stick to fast software and it is still a decent experience. Is two or three seconds of loading before the 15 minute YouTube video a long time to wait?
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  Yes, remember that the netbook trend died in 2013. A netbook is a Ivy Bridge-era system.
  - doubled112 4y ago
    Those were awful, especially the first gen, but I have fond memories of them since it was the first time young me could afford anything new and shaped like a laptop. The MSI Wind U100 with an Atom N270 CPU would even overclock. It didn't help, but it would do it.
  - oynqr 4y ago
    If that's allowed, you can't browse the web on an Alder Lake-era system.
- beebeepka 4y ago
  I was on my good old 2500k until 2019. It was perfectly and I only upgraded because I had the itch
drewzero1 4y ago
For a 20 year old machine, sure. But any machine that was decent 10 years ago should be at least okay today. My 2008 Thinkpad handles all but the heaviest websites without too much trouble, as long as I don't have too many tabs open at a time.
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  This is a fair point, the machine I am using as a reference was pretty bad at best even when it was new (a 2012 netbook).
- blacksmith_tb 4y ago
  Agreed, I am using a 2009 Toshiba laptop with Pop! on it, I did some cheap upgrades (maxed RAM to 10GB, used a spare SSD to replace the old HD), it's perfectly usable.
bragr 4y ago
How is hacker news a 1.0 website? It's full of JS and dynamic elements. It might be aping the style of 1.0 web but it is very much a web 2.0 site.
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  > It's full of JS 152 lines of sparse JS ammounting to 5kb uncompressed? Not exactly what I would call "full of js". For comparison your average hasty made, JS infested legacy web site there embeds Moment.js - and that by itself is 19kb compressed.
  - bragr 4y ago
    Compared to the size of the site, and the features? Yeah, most of them involve some amount of JS. Besides, HN is all dynamic user generated content, that's the crux of web 2.0.
    - pluijzer 4y ago
      How I perceive it is that web 2.0 is about dynamic loaded content and as far as I know HN doesn't do this but loads static pages from a server just like ye old web 1.0 forum pages would do.
      - bragr 4y ago
        If you go off Wikipedia's definition, it's more about user generated content and HN is definitely that. Might not meet your definition of web 2.0, but it meets this one: >A Web 2.0 website allows users to interact and collaborate with each other through social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community. This contrasts the first generation of Web 1.0-era websites where people were limited to viewing content in a passive manner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
        silisili 4y ago
freemint 4y ago
Even that might not work. If it came with a succinctly obscure Operating System you run into SSL problems.

pmontra 4y ago

8.5 yo for sure and with Ubuntu. I improved it a little (32 GB and two 1 TB SSDs) but I bet that the original 8 GB + HDD would be OK for browsing. Browsers got faster and that helps compensating sites that got slower.

ElectricalUnion 4y ago
> I bet that the original 8 GB Second source data I collected from the Steam Hardware Survey (that being a biased group with better that average specs) for 2012 seems to point that the "average Steam user" had around 5 GB of system RAM. > HDD would be OK for browsing. Browsers got faster and that helps compensating sites that got slower. I just remembered this article (and that article talks about SSDs, not HDDs!) surprising conclusions, posted in HN a few days ago: https://simonhearne.com/2020/network-faster-than-cache/ https://simonhearne.com/2020/network-faster-than-cache/
mrob 4y ago
4GiB is plenty for browsing if you run uBlock Origin and disable Javascript by default.
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  Well, if you don't run uBlock Origin (or bare minimum another less efficient tracker blocker), no amount of RAM can really save you once you cross the threshold of 60+ tabs open.
  - usr1106 4y ago
    If you want to save resources (and that what talking about 2GB machines is) you just don't keep 60+ tabs open. You cannot eat the cake and keep it at the same time. I cannot see how anyone can jump around between 60 tabs every day. If I have more than 10-20 tabs open after a working day I know that the day went in a very unorganized way and I have probably more open tasks than in the morning when I started. It happens because I have plenty of unused RAM on my work machine, but it's nothing I'd defend. Maybe a smaller machine would just force me to organize my work better. Bookmarks are there for organizing stuff one will need at some time later. Keeping tabs open does not seem to serve any special purpose. Unless you want to save cycles to render it again, but I don't remember many pages I would like to use frequently that even a very old PC does not bring up in decent time. The local weather forecast loads rather slowly, but that I want to reload every time I visit it anyway.

srvmshr 4y ago

While clean reinstalling my macOS last month, my recovery partition was lost - and I booted via internet recovery to MacOS Mavericks. Needless to say, I couldn't even sign in with Apple ID via browser or app store because the world has moved on & these browsers can't work on modern webpages. (I had to use my phone concurrently to help me out with downloading rescue stuff & moving via USB or terminal)

adrianN 4y ago
Ten year old software is very different from ten year old hardware.
- srvmshr 4y ago
  The parent (you replied to) discussed the state of browsers The problem with this tiny projects is that you need a web browser. And good luck browsing the web in old PCs [...] As I can imagine now, a lot of things will not run on 10 y.o. hardware once you get limited by the last base OS you could install.
  - JasonFruit 4y ago
    In the context of Linux, ten year old hardware is widely supported, and will not limit what base OS version and software is installable, though its capabilities might affect usability. We're not really discussing OS X here, where planned obsolescence is such a huge factor.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    That's not really a Linux problem as far as I can tell. You can install a five-minute old Debian-testing on 10 year old hardware without too many surprises.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  Main private laptop is an HP elitebook 8440p from 2012 and it works perfectly fine with modern web and streaming, currently running Fedora 36. It came out with a core i7 and it supports up to 16GB of ram. I upgraded it to 12GB a few years ago and an SSD. Caveat: it was a model from the professionnal line, came with free ram slot and is easily disk swappable. The same could not be said of a model from the consumer line that would have had its memory maxed out at 2GB.

wongarsu 4y ago

A good $500 PC [1] 10 years ago seems to have a 2x3GHz Pentium, 4GB RAM and a 500GB HDD. The $1000 PC [2] from tomshardware was a 4x3.4GHz Core i5 with 8GB RAM, a GTX 670 and a 60GB SSD paired with a 750GB HDD. The $1000 still sounds totally adequate for surfing, office use and some light gaming, as long as you invest $20-$50 in a bigger SSD (or have some patience when starting software). Machines like this are still sold, they're just smaller and cheaper now. Even the 2012 $500 PC is probably fine if you upgrade the RAM, and even without that upgrade is not much different from some of the mini-PCs sold today [3] 1: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-pc-overclocking-pc-building,3273.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-pc-overclocking-... 2: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-a-pc-overclock-benchmark,3276.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-a-pc-overclock-be... 3: https://psref.lenovo.com/Detail/ThinkCentre/ThinkCentre_M70q?M=11DT009WGE https://psref.lenovo.com/Detail/ThinkCentre/ThinkCentre_M70q...

adrianmsmith 4y ago
Absolutely - I am typing this on a 2012 Windows 7 PC, 8GB RAM and an SSD. CPU has a Geekbench 5 single-core score of 400 or something, i.e. in no way fast. But surfing the web is snappy and the computer works fine.
cubano 4y ago
Exactly $499US is all you need even today to get a pretty damn good machine in my book....4.4GHz 12th Gen i5, 4k OLED, 8GB DDR5, 256GB SSD PCIe4.0...from, of all places, Best Buy? Now trust me...Best Buy is pretty much the last place I would look to buy a computer these days, but I have to give them credit for value here even though this system comes with crappy Intel graphics. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-zenbook-14-2-8k-oled-laptop-intel-evo-platform-12th-gen-core-i5-processor-8gb-memory-256gb-ssd-ponder-blue-ponder-blue/6494331.p?skuId=6494331 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-zenbook-14-2-8k-oled-lapto...
cardiffspaceman 4y ago
I’m a fan of 10-year-old hardware. In 2012 I was handed an i7 3770 with 8 GiB of RAM and a git URI for WebKit and told go forth and port! I think the box cost $750 and I know it ran the latest Debian. This machine is still my daily use machine with today’s latest Debian, more HDD, some SSD for ccache, and triple the RAM. The original configuration was so nice I bought a duplicate for home use. That one has had its video card upgraded and the HDD replaced with SSD, it gets used somewhat differently. The graphics upgrade was to match it to a 21x9 screen I splurged on. And it runs Windows 10 decently enough.

jsjohnst 4y ago

Heck, the first gen retina MBP is now 10 years old. It’s definitely still a very capable machine, albeit the Nvidia GeForce 650M GPU is a bit underwhelming, even for non-gaming.

focusedone 4y ago

I'm forcing myself to get better at linux using a 16 year old laptop. I expected its age to be the second biggest irritation (after my ingorance), but really it's fine. A tiny bit slower than I'm used to, but for most of what I use it for, it's shockingly capable.