6 ms·

This is another Thinkpad festival post? Let me just cold you down a bit by telling you that a 12-year-old laptop still kicking isn't that big of a deal. I have

by nirui 3y ago

This is another Thinkpad festival post? Let me just cold you down a bit by telling you that a 12-year-old laptop still kicking isn't that big of a deal. I have this DELL Studio laptop released back in September, 2009, and it can still kick very well too if I decide to recruit it back to my "workforce". I retired it just 3~4 years ago because I got a T480. Heck, some of my code (old versions) for the same project that I'm currently working on is still on that laptop. Before it's retirement days, it work 24/7 a day every day all year around, burned through two power supplies, sometimes 90 degrees C on the poor Intel Duo Core CPU etc. But it never dies. So, me looking these Thinkpad posts, I never really feel quite impressed...

felixhammerl 3y ago
Wife uses a mid-2013 Macbook Air as a daily driver still after >10 years, works in academia. What happened is simply that CPU stopped being the thing that made stuff slow, so a mid-2010s upper midrange can still hold its own today, ssd was already good then, and memory plateaued around 8gb for entry level machines some 5 years ago. So as long as your thermals don't suck, your ssd doesn't smoke out, and your keyboard holds up, you can still use these machines today. If you maxed out memory then, that is.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Atleast for PC hardware, CPU development was severely stifled by lack of competition most of the 2010s. Intel had no credible competition until AMD got their shit together with Zen, and wasted no opportunity to rest on their laurels. This is also why both newer Zen and also Apple's new silicon is seemingly making such fantastic advances. It's essentially catching up to where we could have been all along if we had a healthier market.
- Unfrozen0688 3y ago
  Even more so with desktops. I am running a 2014 CPU i7 4790k with 32GB RAM and a 1070ti. Due to it being a desktop w noctua cooler the temps never get high. Keyboard and mouse you just replace when worn out. This year I am thinking about upgrading. But my 2019 Thinkpad already feels slow... so I never got laptops for long use. They suck.
  - seanp2k2 3y ago
    Yeah, I got used to desktops with RAID, powerful GPUs, large nice monitors, etc back in the early 2000s and laptops never feel fast. They can’t be — I don’t care how many benchmark results say otherwise, a machine with a given size square inches worth of silicon at a given nm scale using a 130 watt power adapter isn’t going to break the laws of physics and beat a desktop drawing 800 watts with 2-5x as much same-nm silicon. Especially now that I’ve gotten into video editing and stuff like generative visuals for music, you really notice where they’re saving power on laptops when switching between a desktop and laptop RTX 4090 + 16-core CPU.
  - secondcoming 3y ago
    I also have a 4790k chugging along! I had to upgrade due to max RAM of 32GB, so I got a Dell Precision Mobile laptop with 128GB. I normally hate laptops, but with remote working meaning the occasional commute it was unavoidable.
  - cdelsolar 3y ago
    Clearly you haven’t tried Apple Silicon laptops
    - Unfrozen0688 3y ago
      I haven't and they are a very new and recent creation also windows games on desktop better get it? Every single time on this site you people just LOVE your M1s dont you. Desktops generally offer better performance, get it? Also pheripherals
      - felixhammerl 3y ago
        Apple Silicon truly is phenomenal for dev stuff. But gaming ... oh well. And you obviously can't heat your room with them, so your feet may feel cold. ;)
        Proziam 3y ago
        The last time I considered Apple Silicon I discovered that there were a few compatibility issues. I can't recall which softwares specifically, but it put me off "for a generation or two" and I ended up buying a Framework instead. What is the compatibility story at this point?
agumonkey 3y ago
ah well funny, the only dell studio i saw couldn't operate more than 6 months without requiring surgery (motherboard, dvd drive, keyboard)
- mickael-kerjean 3y ago
  and the first thinkpad I bought died 2 days after the warranty expired
  - worthless-trash 3y ago
    Lenovo will still usually honor it within that timeframe. All I had to do was ask nicely.
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    out of curiosity, what period was that ? good old ibm era or early lenovo buy-out ?
baz00 3y ago
That's not normal for Dell. Believe me. We bought a boat load of very recent Precision series and getting 12-18 months out of them would be considered a miracle. I've got a dead 5550 in the cupboard (thermal failure) and my 7670 is dying now as well. Also I have so many blown up Dell docks I look like a far Eastern recycling slum at the moment. Their monitors are good though!
- nirui 3y ago
  I think the problem here is "recent". Many vendors stopped making laptops as they used to. You would think with less moving parts in those modern laptops they should fail less... not the case. Now days, simply pulling the USB-C charging cable too hard in the wrong way (say tripped over it) maybe enough to kill some boards. I learned it the hard way so just don't ever do it :)
  - baz00 3y ago
    Yeah that last one gets me. The USB-C connectors should always be on a replaceable board. The ex wife threw a cushion at me and broke the USB-C connector off my T470 motherboard. Fortunately it has a traditional charger hole in it that still works. That was one of the many reasons I divorced her :)
- RedShift1 3y ago
  Same experience with Dell Latitudes. Failures we've had: ethernet port broken, motherboard dead, bottom cover cracks, paint flaking off 5 minutes of being outside the box, battery swollen, touchpad buttons broken, USB C ports broken, heating up like crazy and draining the battery whilst in standby, keyboard missing keypresses, ... And that's just off the top of my head. After 5 years we're now using HP ProBooks and EliteBooks but already had to service some of those too unfortunately...
- sumtechguy 3y ago
  All fleets of computers have that 'oddball' that lasts forever. That he has a dell that will not die is kind of interesting. I have an HP laptop that is only kicking the bucket because the plastic is starting to become brittle. The rest of the computer is fine (other than the battery). I know that for the type of HP I bought that is not normal for a computer from 2012. The MSI I bought to replace it is well on its way to rubbish after 2-3 years (less than that as I noticed these things a year ago).
rollcat 3y ago
> a 12-year-old laptop still kicking isn't that big of a deal. I have a 20yro TiBook. Both the RTC and the main battery are dead, and there's a tiny screen defect, but the machine is otherwise perfectly usable (if relatively slow). And by usable, I mean the desktop experience of Mac OS X 10.5 often feels more polished than that of some of the modern OS's... The big bummer is that the modern web keeps raising a wall that's getting too tall for these machines to climb. TLS, JavaScript, and the firehose of new standards are making a lot of resources inaccessible. (If you're in charge of maintaining a web server, please consider allowing unencrypted traffic on port 80 (rather than unconditionally redirecting to HTTPS), unless the Upgrade-Insecure-Requests[1] is present. Coupled with HSTS[2], it allows these "living museum pieces" to stay alive, while not compromising on security.) [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Upgrade-Insecure-Requests https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Up... [2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Strict-Transport-Security https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/St...
- seanp2k2 3y ago
  This —- I really don’t care if my blog with no user registration or comments gets accessed over HTTP/1.1 without an SSL cert. Further, I find the way Chrome handles HSTS pretty gross, as some of us actually tinker with stuff that REALLY doesn’t need encryption, like little dev boards and projects running locally. Chrome makes those exceedingly difficult to use, thus the need for extremely convoluted workarounds like https://github.com/ip2k/I-Dont-Care-About-HSTS-For-Localhost https://github.com/ip2k/I-Dont-Care-About-HSTS-For-Localhost (it’s my repo).
  - bruce343434 3y ago
    I do care. I don't want to have my name attached to any advertisements that shady airport routers may insert into the html for instance. TLS is a very good thing and we should have more of it, not less. Sorry that your unupgradable software comes from an era where security was not important.
    - rollcat 3y ago
xtracto 3y ago
About a year ago I bought a Thinkpad for personal use after looking for a windows laptop (after a windows surface died). I thought I'd made the best choice after heavy research. Earlier this year I got a Dell Latitude for work. Both laptops are comparable. But the Thinkpad plastic seems cheap an "bendy" while the Dell just seems higher quality. I had never bought dell before but loved the finish, and so far it's been good. A glad extra is that i was able to choose Ubuntu and save the Windows tax (as I use Linux as my daily work desktop)
- lproven 3y ago
  What Thinkpad? The newer, the more plasticky. Post the ??20 series the keyboards get progressively worse and worse.
ryzvonusef 3y ago
Excuse me sir, you are interrupting our Thinkpad circletrek, begone with your Dell heresy. I absolutely love my cute little Thinkpad X230T, but finding a battery for that fits the T variant is a pain in the butt in my country, I tried like a 6-7 in the shop but they were all old and dead, very little market for them so they stayed unused and died out, I am limping along on my 15-minute battery for now. I believe Lenovo could have designed the laptop a bit better to fit the more common battery found in the X220/X230, which I can find very easily, but Lenovo had a weird mindset at the time, a bit like Nokia, come to think of it. Lenovo has had some missteps too, but I think their brand name is(was?) famous for a reason. In my country Lenovo/Dell/HP laptops from old American office discards are rather common, and I have had better luck with Lenovo than the other two, though it could just be my family's experience. I am in the lookout for a reasonably priced T480, because soon windows 11 will become inevitable and I would like to be ready. Stupid TPM 2.0 requirements will cause a lot of good laptops to go bunk.
- dataworm 3y ago
  The TPM requirement can be easily bypassed with a registry key.
  - ryzvonusef 3y ago
    True, but I believe it's just a harbinger of other such changes. Today it's TPM, tomorrow it's pixel shaders.
  - scohesc 3y ago
    I wonder if Microsoft will eventually hard-code the requirement into their OS - they've stated the registry fix will work as a workaround, but "you might not get the latest updates".
- IYasha 3y ago
  I'm still running win7+linux with no reasonable urge to update on X140. Win11 brings no improvement to my life and I doubt anyone else's.
jefc1111 3y ago
I am a Thinkpad fanboi, my oldest fully working one is around 14 years old. I am also super-impressed that my partner's 10 year old Macbook air is still doing fine. It's been abused to the point that it is a bit bent! The software is a bigger problem though...
osigurdson 3y ago
I have had 2 Dell XPS 13s that died due to the power connector getting worn out (but otherwise work completely fine).
inparen 3y ago
My Dell studio 1535 still allows me to browse web. MacBook Pro bought 5 years ago, failed three times. It refused to boot now. I have used HP, Thinkbook, Dell, Mac laptops. I trust Dell laptop most.
hospitalJail 3y ago
I think due to $100-$200 laptops floating around in the late 2000s, people started getting impressed with computers serving more than 4 years. Even back then, you could get almost a decade out of a computer in some sort of capacity. Give it to the youngest kid or mom, they only play clicking games. To this day, I see people amazed that their $1000 laptop survived ~7 years. Meanwhile I have $550 laptops that are still being used for gaming(Minecraft/Steam) literally 9 years later. I think the root cause is that people only spent $1000 dollars on a laptop when it had a glowing logo on it, and were impressed that a $1000 laptop would last more than 4 years. To any other nerd, they knew that the SSD was the real game changer.
junkilo 3y ago
if you know you know: thinkpads do make for happy compute. fwiw, thinkpad/lenovo isn't the only team* can assemble a pc properly. its just that they tend to keep working even after you drop them and spill coffee on them and come with an escape key. <.< *] it's really the sub-culture/team behind thinkpads that we appreciate, which ironically isn't normally distributed throughout all of Lenovo.
jjav 3y ago
> Let me just cold you down a bit by telling you that a 12-year-old laptop still kicking isn't that big of a deal. Indeed. I have a Toshiba laptop I use almost daily, I bought it used in 2010. So not sure exactly when it was built, probably 2008-09 or so.
lproven 3y ago
Your rant is rather incoherent so it's hard to be sure what you're saying, but it seems to me that you're missing several different points. > the poor Intel Duo Core CPU Do you mean an Intel Core Duo? You both mangled the chip model number and didn't give the Dell model number at all, so I can't check. If so, there's point #1. A Core Duo is a 32-bit chip. It maxes out at 3-and-a-bit GB of RAM. That's not much use in 2023 and it can't run common apps such as Google Chrome, which is 64-bit only. Point #2 is not that these elderly Thinkpads still work, it's that they are still useful. I don't know what Dell you have but I own two Thinkpad T420 machines, as mentioned in this post. Both are still in use. Here is why: They were high-end devices when new. That means no cheap crappy hardware like "Pentium Dual Core" or Celeron chips, but full-spec Core 2 Duos. They are 64-bit bit CPUs, so my i5 T420 has 8GB of RAM and dual-boots FreeBSD 13.2 and ChromeOS Flex. My i7 T420 has 16GB of RAM and USB3, and it runs the latest Win10, the latest Fedora, and the latest Ubuntu, in multiboot. Point #3: they are expandable with cheap bits. My i7 one has a discrete GPU. That helps: they're still quite quick. Mine can run 2 VMs side-by-side and remain useful, or 1 usefully-big VM and a few bloated Electron apps on the host and still remain responsive. That's why people go on about them. They are still useful in a way a 12YO Core Duo can never be. They also have great expansion, so my machines both have dual SSDs, as well as optical drives, as well as lots of ports. DisplayPort, which can drive HDMI (while HDMI can't drive DisplayPort) and SVGA. Mine have $5 USB3 ExpressCards in them, because why not? You can't have too many USB ports, or too fast. Point #4: great keyboards, and 3 physical mouse buttons. I am a writer. I demand a good keyboard. I am a heavy Linux user. I need 3 mouse buttons. I don't care much about trackpads and I don't want gestures, but I need that middle mouse button. Now none of those might matter to you, but they do matter to some of us and that's why we use them and keep going on about them. Just accept that other people like things you don't and move on.

by nirui 3y ago

felixhammerl 3y ago

Wife uses a mid-2013 Macbook Air as a daily driver still after >10 years, works in academia. What happened is simply that CPU stopped being the thing that made stuff slow, so a mid-2010s upper midrange can still hold its own today, ssd was already good then, and memory plateaued around 8gb for entry level machines some 5 years ago. So as long as your thermals don't suck, your ssd doesn't smoke out, and your keyboard holds up, you can still use these machines today. If you maxed out memory then, that is.

marginalia_nu 3y ago
Atleast for PC hardware, CPU development was severely stifled by lack of competition most of the 2010s. Intel had no credible competition until AMD got their shit together with Zen, and wasted no opportunity to rest on their laurels. This is also why both newer Zen and also Apple's new silicon is seemingly making such fantastic advances. It's essentially catching up to where we could have been all along if we had a healthier market.
Unfrozen0688 3y ago
Even more so with desktops. I am running a 2014 CPU i7 4790k with 32GB RAM and a 1070ti. Due to it being a desktop w noctua cooler the temps never get high. Keyboard and mouse you just replace when worn out. This year I am thinking about upgrading. But my 2019 Thinkpad already feels slow... so I never got laptops for long use. They suck.
- seanp2k2 3y ago
  Yeah, I got used to desktops with RAID, powerful GPUs, large nice monitors, etc back in the early 2000s and laptops never feel fast. They can’t be — I don’t care how many benchmark results say otherwise, a machine with a given size square inches worth of silicon at a given nm scale using a 130 watt power adapter isn’t going to break the laws of physics and beat a desktop drawing 800 watts with 2-5x as much same-nm silicon. Especially now that I’ve gotten into video editing and stuff like generative visuals for music, you really notice where they’re saving power on laptops when switching between a desktop and laptop RTX 4090 + 16-core CPU.
- secondcoming 3y ago
  I also have a 4790k chugging along! I had to upgrade due to max RAM of 32GB, so I got a Dell Precision Mobile laptop with 128GB. I normally hate laptops, but with remote working meaning the occasional commute it was unavoidable.
- cdelsolar 3y ago
  Clearly you haven’t tried Apple Silicon laptops
  - Unfrozen0688 3y ago
    I haven't and they are a very new and recent creation also windows games on desktop better get it? Every single time on this site you people just LOVE your M1s dont you. Desktops generally offer better performance, get it? Also pheripherals
    - felixhammerl 3y ago
      Apple Silicon truly is phenomenal for dev stuff. But gaming ... oh well. And you obviously can't heat your room with them, so your feet may feel cold. ;)
      - Proziam 3y ago
        The last time I considered Apple Silicon I discovered that there were a few compatibility issues. I can't recall which softwares specifically, but it put me off "for a generation or two" and I ended up buying a Framework instead. What is the compatibility story at this point?

agumonkey 3y ago

ah well funny, the only dell studio i saw couldn't operate more than 6 months without requiring surgery (motherboard, dvd drive, keyboard)

mickael-kerjean 3y ago
and the first thinkpad I bought died 2 days after the warranty expired
- worthless-trash 3y ago
  Lenovo will still usually honor it within that timeframe. All I had to do was ask nicely.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  out of curiosity, what period was that ? good old ibm era or early lenovo buy-out ?

baz00 3y ago

That's not normal for Dell. Believe me. We bought a boat load of very recent Precision series and getting 12-18 months out of them would be considered a miracle. I've got a dead 5550 in the cupboard (thermal failure) and my 7670 is dying now as well. Also I have so many blown up Dell docks I look like a far Eastern recycling slum at the moment. Their monitors are good though!

nirui 3y ago
I think the problem here is "recent". Many vendors stopped making laptops as they used to. You would think with less moving parts in those modern laptops they should fail less... not the case. Now days, simply pulling the USB-C charging cable too hard in the wrong way (say tripped over it) maybe enough to kill some boards. I learned it the hard way so just don't ever do it :)
- baz00 3y ago
  Yeah that last one gets me. The USB-C connectors should always be on a replaceable board. The ex wife threw a cushion at me and broke the USB-C connector off my T470 motherboard. Fortunately it has a traditional charger hole in it that still works. That was one of the many reasons I divorced her :)
RedShift1 3y ago
Same experience with Dell Latitudes. Failures we've had: ethernet port broken, motherboard dead, bottom cover cracks, paint flaking off 5 minutes of being outside the box, battery swollen, touchpad buttons broken, USB C ports broken, heating up like crazy and draining the battery whilst in standby, keyboard missing keypresses, ... And that's just off the top of my head. After 5 years we're now using HP ProBooks and EliteBooks but already had to service some of those too unfortunately...
sumtechguy 3y ago
All fleets of computers have that 'oddball' that lasts forever. That he has a dell that will not die is kind of interesting. I have an HP laptop that is only kicking the bucket because the plastic is starting to become brittle. The rest of the computer is fine (other than the battery). I know that for the type of HP I bought that is not normal for a computer from 2012. The MSI I bought to replace it is well on its way to rubbish after 2-3 years (less than that as I noticed these things a year ago).

rollcat 3y ago

> a 12-year-old laptop still kicking isn't that big of a deal. I have a 20yro TiBook. Both the RTC and the main battery are dead, and there's a tiny screen defect, but the machine is otherwise perfectly usable (if relatively slow). And by usable, I mean the desktop experience of Mac OS X 10.5 often feels more polished than that of some of the modern OS's... The big bummer is that the modern web keeps raising a wall that's getting too tall for these machines to climb. TLS, JavaScript, and the firehose of new standards are making a lot of resources inaccessible. (If you're in charge of maintaining a web server, please consider allowing unencrypted traffic on port 80 (rather than unconditionally redirecting to HTTPS), unless the Upgrade-Insecure-Requests[1] is present. Coupled with HSTS[2], it allows these "living museum pieces" to stay alive, while not compromising on security.) [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Upgrade-Insecure-Requests https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Up... [2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Strict-Transport-Security https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/St...

seanp2k2 3y ago
This —- I really don’t care if my blog with no user registration or comments gets accessed over HTTP/1.1 without an SSL cert. Further, I find the way Chrome handles HSTS pretty gross, as some of us actually tinker with stuff that REALLY doesn’t need encryption, like little dev boards and projects running locally. Chrome makes those exceedingly difficult to use, thus the need for extremely convoluted workarounds like https://github.com/ip2k/I-Dont-Care-About-HSTS-For-Localhost https://github.com/ip2k/I-Dont-Care-About-HSTS-For-Localhost (it’s my repo).
- bruce343434 3y ago
  I do care. I don't want to have my name attached to any advertisements that shady airport routers may insert into the html for instance. TLS is a very good thing and we should have more of it, not less. Sorry that your unupgradable software comes from an era where security was not important.
  - rollcat 3y ago

xtracto 3y ago

About a year ago I bought a Thinkpad for personal use after looking for a windows laptop (after a windows surface died). I thought I'd made the best choice after heavy research. Earlier this year I got a Dell Latitude for work. Both laptops are comparable. But the Thinkpad plastic seems cheap an "bendy" while the Dell just seems higher quality. I had never bought dell before but loved the finish, and so far it's been good. A glad extra is that i was able to choose Ubuntu and save the Windows tax (as I use Linux as my daily work desktop)

lproven 3y ago
What Thinkpad? The newer, the more plasticky. Post the ??20 series the keyboards get progressively worse and worse.

ryzvonusef 3y ago

Excuse me sir, you are interrupting our Thinkpad circletrek, begone with your Dell heresy. I absolutely love my cute little Thinkpad X230T, but finding a battery for that fits the T variant is a pain in the butt in my country, I tried like a 6-7 in the shop but they were all old and dead, very little market for them so they stayed unused and died out, I am limping along on my 15-minute battery for now. I believe Lenovo could have designed the laptop a bit better to fit the more common battery found in the X220/X230, which I can find very easily, but Lenovo had a weird mindset at the time, a bit like Nokia, come to think of it. Lenovo has had some missteps too, but I think their brand name is(was?) famous for a reason. In my country Lenovo/Dell/HP laptops from old American office discards are rather common, and I have had better luck with Lenovo than the other two, though it could just be my family's experience. I am in the lookout for a reasonably priced T480, because soon windows 11 will become inevitable and I would like to be ready. Stupid TPM 2.0 requirements will cause a lot of good laptops to go bunk.

dataworm 3y ago
The TPM requirement can be easily bypassed with a registry key.
- ryzvonusef 3y ago
  True, but I believe it's just a harbinger of other such changes. Today it's TPM, tomorrow it's pixel shaders.
- scohesc 3y ago
  I wonder if Microsoft will eventually hard-code the requirement into their OS - they've stated the registry fix will work as a workaround, but "you might not get the latest updates".
IYasha 3y ago
I'm still running win7+linux with no reasonable urge to update on X140. Win11 brings no improvement to my life and I doubt anyone else's.

jefc1111 3y ago

I am a Thinkpad fanboi, my oldest fully working one is around 14 years old. I am also super-impressed that my partner's 10 year old Macbook air is still doing fine. It's been abused to the point that it is a bit bent! The software is a bigger problem though...

osigurdson 3y ago

I have had 2 Dell XPS 13s that died due to the power connector getting worn out (but otherwise work completely fine).

inparen 3y ago

My Dell studio 1535 still allows me to browse web. MacBook Pro bought 5 years ago, failed three times. It refused to boot now. I have used HP, Thinkbook, Dell, Mac laptops. I trust Dell laptop most.

hospitalJail 3y ago

I think due to $100-$200 laptops floating around in the late 2000s, people started getting impressed with computers serving more than 4 years. Even back then, you could get almost a decade out of a computer in some sort of capacity. Give it to the youngest kid or mom, they only play clicking games. To this day, I see people amazed that their $1000 laptop survived ~7 years. Meanwhile I have $550 laptops that are still being used for gaming(Minecraft/Steam) literally 9 years later. I think the root cause is that people only spent $1000 dollars on a laptop when it had a glowing logo on it, and were impressed that a $1000 laptop would last more than 4 years. To any other nerd, they knew that the SSD was the real game changer.

junkilo 3y ago

if you know you know: thinkpads do make for happy compute. fwiw, thinkpad/lenovo isn't the only team* can assemble a pc properly. its just that they tend to keep working even after you drop them and spill coffee on them and come with an escape key. <.< *] it's really the sub-culture/team behind thinkpads that we appreciate, which ironically isn't normally distributed throughout all of Lenovo.

jjav 3y ago

> Let me just cold you down a bit by telling you that a 12-year-old laptop still kicking isn't that big of a deal. Indeed. I have a Toshiba laptop I use almost daily, I bought it used in 2010. So not sure exactly when it was built, probably 2008-09 or so.

lproven 3y ago

Your rant is rather incoherent so it's hard to be sure what you're saying, but it seems to me that you're missing several different points. > the poor Intel Duo Core CPU Do you mean an Intel Core Duo? You both mangled the chip model number and didn't give the Dell model number at all, so I can't check. If so, there's point #1. A Core Duo is a 32-bit chip. It maxes out at 3-and-a-bit GB of RAM. That's not much use in 2023 and it can't run common apps such as Google Chrome, which is 64-bit only. Point #2 is not that these elderly Thinkpads still work, it's that they are still useful. I don't know what Dell you have but I own two Thinkpad T420 machines, as mentioned in this post. Both are still in use. Here is why: They were high-end devices when new. That means no cheap crappy hardware like "Pentium Dual Core" or Celeron chips, but full-spec Core 2 Duos. They are 64-bit bit CPUs, so my i5 T420 has 8GB of RAM and dual-boots FreeBSD 13.2 and ChromeOS Flex. My i7 T420 has 16GB of RAM and USB3, and it runs the latest Win10, the latest Fedora, and the latest Ubuntu, in multiboot. Point #3: they are expandable with cheap bits. My i7 one has a discrete GPU. That helps: they're still quite quick. Mine can run 2 VMs side-by-side and remain useful, or 1 usefully-big VM and a few bloated Electron apps on the host and still remain responsive. That's why people go on about them. They are still useful in a way a 12YO Core Duo can never be. They also have great expansion, so my machines both have dual SSDs, as well as optical drives, as well as lots of ports. DisplayPort, which can drive HDMI (while HDMI can't drive DisplayPort) and SVGA. Mine have $5 USB3 ExpressCards in them, because why not? You can't have too many USB ports, or too fast. Point #4: great keyboards, and 3 physical mouse buttons. I am a writer. I demand a good keyboard. I am a heavy Linux user. I need 3 mouse buttons. I don't care much about trackpads and I don't want gestures, but I need that middle mouse button. Now none of those might matter to you, but they do matter to some of us and that's why we use them and keep going on about them. Just accept that other people like things you don't and move on.