7 ms·

For a lot if what I do, the CPU on an older laptop is just fine. So, I too use really old laptops. That said, I am upgrading laptops that sold with 2 - 4 GB of

For a lot if what I do, the CPU on an older laptop is just fine. So, I too use really old laptops. That said, I am upgrading laptops that sold with 2 - 4 GB of RAM to 16 GB, or at least 8 GB. Often I am replacing on old HDD ( maybe as slow as 5400 RPM ) with a faster SSD. That SSD also juices the battery life. So, what I am using is a lot nicer than what the original owner had to deal with. Many laptops today will not age as well as, in ten years, that soldered on 8 GB is really going to be a bummer. I use Linux a fair bit which makes a difference. Linux is fantastic on older hardware and the software itself is totally up to date. I use old Mac laptops a fair bit. The version of MacOS they support would be unusable as would the applications that would still run on it. The same is becoming true of Windows.

Dalewyn 3y ago
>Linux is fantastic on older hardware I've been having a hard time getting Linux to work on older hardware ever since the majority of distros dropped 32-bit builds. Then again, "older" for me means stuff from the Pentium through the Pentium 4 era. Seeing as "older" today means Sandy Bridge and the like, the moral of this little tale is I am a fucking old man angry at the kids on my lawn.
- ant6n 3y ago
  But there must be some with 32bit support?
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    Debian still supports 32 bit for the latest version and there are several small distros that are explicitly aimed at 32 bit.
    - ant6n 3y ago
      Seems like Debian is all one would ever need.
  - tmtvl 3y ago
    OpenSUSE still builds i686 ISOs. Of course if you want to go crazy there's always TinyCore.
  - pwg 3y ago
    Slackware (http://www.slackware.com/ http://www.slackware.com/) also still provides a 32-bit version as well.
- colechristensen 3y ago
  I think you have graduated to retro computing enthusiast.
  - beebeepka 3y ago
    No kidding. Not to mention that Pentium 4 was just about to worst line of intel CPUs, culminating with junk like pentium d 820 and its siblings. People ought to be paid to use this crap
    - brailsafe 3y ago
      People were definitely paid to use this crap at that time
- jakogut 3y ago
  The x86-64 architecture was introduced in 1999, with the first processor introduced in 2003. Comparatively, the 8088, introduced in 1979, was barely older at the time than the 64-bit Opteron is now. It might be time to let i386 go.
  - mike_hock 3y ago
    Not as long as i386 devices still exist that are superior in at least one way to any amd64 or arm alternative. And what "superior" means depends on the use case. Some Mega Ryzen Uber Speed CPU with a Googol FLOPS that can't connect to anything is worthless to me.
    - gymbeaux 3y ago
      What’s an example of something you’d prefer a 32-bit CPU for over a 64-bit CPU?
      - mike_hock 3y ago
        The CPU? Nothing. The device isn't just the CPU.
        gymbeaux 3y ago
        That doesn’t answer my question
- mike_hock 3y ago
  I won't take any distro seriously that doesn't support at least i686, amd64, arm and arm64. Compiling for four architectures can't be too much to ask. Shit software that can't be written portably enough to run on more than amd64 must be kicked off the repo. We need this pressure on developers if we're to maintain a modicum of code quality.
  - dns_snek 3y ago
    > Shit software that can't be written portably enough to run on more than amd64 must be kicked off the repo. Convince me, why should I spend my time supporting i686? Just to accommodate a handful of people still running 32bit hardware? Calling other people's work "shit" just because they don't spend their free time supporting the wishes (not needs!) of 0.1% of their users is rude and extremely entitled.
    - owenmarshall 3y ago
      FWIW, I agree with you. But I think there is an argument to be made: the OpenBSD team has indicated that cross-architecture ports help them find bugs that otherwise might not be noticed if they were just targeting the usual suspects.
    - mike_hock 3y ago
      Why should you spend your time writing it in the first place?
  - Klonoar 3y ago
    What a needlessly dismissive and frankly rude take.
Joeri 3y ago
That soldered ram is indeed a killer, and the transition can be quite sudden. We have a 2014 macbook air with 4gb of soldered ram, and my kid was fine using it for office and browsing, until at one point he suddenly wasn’t. The ram footprint of that software together with macOS updates passed some threshold where it just became too slow, so now he’s using one of my other old laptops, a windows machine with an even slower cpu, but with 8 gb ram, and that one is still ok, for now. Apple’s talk about sustainability is just talk as long as they bake in poison pills like soldered ram and soldered storage. Those machines are unupgradable and unrepairable. The thin and light market is almost entirely soldered ram now, so now I just price in the 16 gb upgrade as the base config price when looking at those.
- brailsafe 3y ago
  Honestly I feel bad for most people who ended up with a 4gb macbook, and Apple should feel some shame for continuing to sell them for so long, not terribly unlike the Vista debacle. 4gb was an awful choice already in 2014, and since 16gb was (I think) the max and still kinda mid, that was the obvious choice; 8GB would have still been fine for an average user. I have no idea if 64gb is the obvious choice now, but the upgrade is so obscenely expensive that I'll be holding onto my intel thing for a while longer. Not as long as I can, but until the cost to value ratio becomes more compelling, or something like a cellular modem comes around.
  - shubb 3y ago
    It's about price detection. If you offer several versions of a product to discover the maximum reach consumer is willing to pay, then the cheapest versions need to be meaningfully worse to drive those who can pay to the me expensive versions.
    - brailsafe 3y ago
      True, but at a certain point you're just selling a shitty product with no longevity and justifying with behavioral manipulation for profit. Same with the 16gb iPad or meager iCloud drive storage tiers. They were fine I guess when they first came out, whatever, but the legitimacy of that tier shouldn't have lasted more than a small number of years
NovaDudely 3y ago
Compute power has never been an issue for me, but I generally try to max out the RAM as much as my budget allows. This is why I still have a 2010 Macbook that is more than fine. Started with 4GB and was barely usable for heavier even when it came out, but dropping 16GB into and it has been smooth sailing for over a decade now. That said my daily runner is now T420 from (2011-ish) that came with 6GB of RAM that is in near mint condition I bought for $100. I swapped the HDD for an SSD and just threw Linux Mint on here - I disable the swap file so that it doesn't hammer the drive. So when it is 6GB of RAM - that is all it can work with but it has never been an issue. But the original HDD was running Windows 7 and oh my gosh the bloat they had installed! This poor thing was in pain with that junk on board! It is amazing how many times I have had an old laptop come up, unusable because of how the OS treats the system and the users just keep dumping more on it that is reasonable. But swap the disk drive and OS and you would never recognize some of these things. I once came across some netbook Toshiba Presario (?) - 1.4Ghz Core Duo with 3GB of RAM running Windows Vista. The poor thing! But do the old one two on it and it was a brilliant little machine for plucking away on, could easily get 6-7 hours on battery as well.
- yokoprime 3y ago
  My main issue with especially lenovos from 2010-2015 is that the lcd panels are poor quality (dim, loads of bleed etc) everything else is really good
  - kramerger 3y ago
    You could buy them with both crappy panels or good high resolution panels. Obviously most companies opted for the cheaper crappier version, that's why most second hand thinkpads have them But you can often buy a LCD upgrade kit for cheap on amazon/aliexpress
- AnonymousPlanet 3y ago
  I have a T420s that really struggles with video e.g. Youtube. Watching any h.245 via VLC or mplayer is impossible. Also the battery is in a bad state and I haven't been able to find a good replacement that isn't equally poor or worse right from the start. It actually has two batteries, one being in what used to be the cd tray. Still, usage time is 3 hours tops. It had been my daily driver for years, running Linux, but I had to replace it with something newer. How is your T420 doing with all this? Did you update the CPU? Does it still have the stock battery?
cm2187 3y ago
The only thing that has aged, other than HDD that can be replaced, is video cards, which you can't upgrade. 4k monitors have become common and you will need something fairly recent to drive that. 4k videos also, my laptop struggles with certain 4k hevc iphone videos.
- pmontra 3y ago
  Actually my ZBook has an upgradable graphic card but I can upgrade it to a better model of the same age, so it's basically useless for compatibility with newer drivers. Nvidia and Noveau are going to end supporting cards from 2014 sooner or later.

Dalewyn 3y ago

>Linux is fantastic on older hardware I've been having a hard time getting Linux to work on older hardware ever since the majority of distros dropped 32-bit builds. Then again, "older" for me means stuff from the Pentium through the Pentium 4 era. Seeing as "older" today means Sandy Bridge and the like, the moral of this little tale is I am a fucking old man angry at the kids on my lawn.

ant6n 3y ago
But there must be some with 32bit support?
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  Debian still supports 32 bit for the latest version and there are several small distros that are explicitly aimed at 32 bit.
  - ant6n 3y ago
    Seems like Debian is all one would ever need.
- tmtvl 3y ago
  OpenSUSE still builds i686 ISOs. Of course if you want to go crazy there's always TinyCore.
- pwg 3y ago
  Slackware (http://www.slackware.com/ http://www.slackware.com/) also still provides a 32-bit version as well.
colechristensen 3y ago
I think you have graduated to retro computing enthusiast.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  No kidding. Not to mention that Pentium 4 was just about to worst line of intel CPUs, culminating with junk like pentium d 820 and its siblings. People ought to be paid to use this crap
  - brailsafe 3y ago
    People were definitely paid to use this crap at that time
jakogut 3y ago
The x86-64 architecture was introduced in 1999, with the first processor introduced in 2003. Comparatively, the 8088, introduced in 1979, was barely older at the time than the 64-bit Opteron is now. It might be time to let i386 go.
- mike_hock 3y ago
  Not as long as i386 devices still exist that are superior in at least one way to any amd64 or arm alternative. And what "superior" means depends on the use case. Some Mega Ryzen Uber Speed CPU with a Googol FLOPS that can't connect to anything is worthless to me.
  - gymbeaux 3y ago
    What’s an example of something you’d prefer a 32-bit CPU for over a 64-bit CPU?
    - mike_hock 3y ago
      The CPU? Nothing. The device isn't just the CPU.
      - gymbeaux 3y ago
        That doesn’t answer my question
mike_hock 3y ago
I won't take any distro seriously that doesn't support at least i686, amd64, arm and arm64. Compiling for four architectures can't be too much to ask. Shit software that can't be written portably enough to run on more than amd64 must be kicked off the repo. We need this pressure on developers if we're to maintain a modicum of code quality.
- dns_snek 3y ago
  > Shit software that can't be written portably enough to run on more than amd64 must be kicked off the repo. Convince me, why should I spend my time supporting i686? Just to accommodate a handful of people still running 32bit hardware? Calling other people's work "shit" just because they don't spend their free time supporting the wishes (not needs!) of 0.1% of their users is rude and extremely entitled.
  - owenmarshall 3y ago
    FWIW, I agree with you. But I think there is an argument to be made: the OpenBSD team has indicated that cross-architecture ports help them find bugs that otherwise might not be noticed if they were just targeting the usual suspects.
  - mike_hock 3y ago
    Why should you spend your time writing it in the first place?
- Klonoar 3y ago
  What a needlessly dismissive and frankly rude take.

Joeri 3y ago

That soldered ram is indeed a killer, and the transition can be quite sudden. We have a 2014 macbook air with 4gb of soldered ram, and my kid was fine using it for office and browsing, until at one point he suddenly wasn’t. The ram footprint of that software together with macOS updates passed some threshold where it just became too slow, so now he’s using one of my other old laptops, a windows machine with an even slower cpu, but with 8 gb ram, and that one is still ok, for now. Apple’s talk about sustainability is just talk as long as they bake in poison pills like soldered ram and soldered storage. Those machines are unupgradable and unrepairable. The thin and light market is almost entirely soldered ram now, so now I just price in the 16 gb upgrade as the base config price when looking at those.

brailsafe 3y ago
Honestly I feel bad for most people who ended up with a 4gb macbook, and Apple should feel some shame for continuing to sell them for so long, not terribly unlike the Vista debacle. 4gb was an awful choice already in 2014, and since 16gb was (I think) the max and still kinda mid, that was the obvious choice; 8GB would have still been fine for an average user. I have no idea if 64gb is the obvious choice now, but the upgrade is so obscenely expensive that I'll be holding onto my intel thing for a while longer. Not as long as I can, but until the cost to value ratio becomes more compelling, or something like a cellular modem comes around.
- shubb 3y ago
  It's about price detection. If you offer several versions of a product to discover the maximum reach consumer is willing to pay, then the cheapest versions need to be meaningfully worse to drive those who can pay to the me expensive versions.
  - brailsafe 3y ago
    True, but at a certain point you're just selling a shitty product with no longevity and justifying with behavioral manipulation for profit. Same with the 16gb iPad or meager iCloud drive storage tiers. They were fine I guess when they first came out, whatever, but the legitimacy of that tier shouldn't have lasted more than a small number of years

NovaDudely 3y ago

Compute power has never been an issue for me, but I generally try to max out the RAM as much as my budget allows. This is why I still have a 2010 Macbook that is more than fine. Started with 4GB and was barely usable for heavier even when it came out, but dropping 16GB into and it has been smooth sailing for over a decade now. That said my daily runner is now T420 from (2011-ish) that came with 6GB of RAM that is in near mint condition I bought for $100. I swapped the HDD for an SSD and just threw Linux Mint on here - I disable the swap file so that it doesn't hammer the drive. So when it is 6GB of RAM - that is all it can work with but it has never been an issue. But the original HDD was running Windows 7 and oh my gosh the bloat they had installed! This poor thing was in pain with that junk on board! It is amazing how many times I have had an old laptop come up, unusable because of how the OS treats the system and the users just keep dumping more on it that is reasonable. But swap the disk drive and OS and you would never recognize some of these things. I once came across some netbook Toshiba Presario (?) - 1.4Ghz Core Duo with 3GB of RAM running Windows Vista. The poor thing! But do the old one two on it and it was a brilliant little machine for plucking away on, could easily get 6-7 hours on battery as well.

yokoprime 3y ago
My main issue with especially lenovos from 2010-2015 is that the lcd panels are poor quality (dim, loads of bleed etc) everything else is really good
- kramerger 3y ago
  You could buy them with both crappy panels or good high resolution panels. Obviously most companies opted for the cheaper crappier version, that's why most second hand thinkpads have them But you can often buy a LCD upgrade kit for cheap on amazon/aliexpress
AnonymousPlanet 3y ago
I have a T420s that really struggles with video e.g. Youtube. Watching any h.245 via VLC or mplayer is impossible. Also the battery is in a bad state and I haven't been able to find a good replacement that isn't equally poor or worse right from the start. It actually has two batteries, one being in what used to be the cd tray. Still, usage time is 3 hours tops. It had been my daily driver for years, running Linux, but I had to replace it with something newer. How is your T420 doing with all this? Did you update the CPU? Does it still have the stock battery?

cm2187 3y ago

The only thing that has aged, other than HDD that can be replaced, is video cards, which you can't upgrade. 4k monitors have become common and you will need something fairly recent to drive that. 4k videos also, my laptop struggles with certain 4k hevc iphone videos.

pmontra 3y ago
Actually my ZBook has an upgradable graphic card but I can upgrade it to a better model of the same age, so it's basically useless for compatibility with newer drivers. Nvidia and Noveau are going to end supporting cards from 2014 sooner or later.