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.
Next month is my desktops CPU model’s 10th birthmonth. Still my default computer.
Absolutely, a ten year old computer today is still capable of doing pretty much everything that most people use computers for. It’s not like the old days when every few years a new tier of computer would come out that made older devices no longer capable of doing what people wanted.
“By the time you see it on the shelf, it’s already obsolete“
I ‘member
It’s all about the pentiums, baby!
Throw the snacks in the bag!
I was still running a Q6600 (a 2.4 gHz quad core from 2007) until a few years ago. It ran most things acceptably for its entire life - it wasn’t until around the time of PS4 Pro/Xbox Whatever ports that it could no longer keep up, and even that was largely due to the other components I was restricted to on such an old motherboard.
That thing was also a tank. The CPU cooler was stock and the thermal paste had degraded and separated to the point it idled at 65c, but I never had a single hardware fault in nearly fifteen years of running it. I kind of miss it.
i had a q9xxx on an x38. i had it overclocked to keep up and it did no sweat for a good while there.
by the time i sold it an old computer collector was buying it from me hahaha.
It depends on how good it was to start with. I have a machine from 2006 that is usable for daily tasks. I also have a netbook from 2009 that can barely do anything.
One hit 12 before I retired it… and now it’s a network file and web server.
Yup. My old gaming rig is now quietly humming away in the basement as my dedicated media server.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
have there been like studies on this? Or anything that shows any sort of relevant data about it? I’ve been curious what effect it has on manufactured stuff like this for a while now.
But that is not caused by “every electron” and only happens under very specific conditions.
…maybe lmao
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).
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!
this comment is fucking brutal dude, i love it.
Or german
Swedish; it’s an ikea commercial from, idk, fifteen or twenty years ago iirc
Hey aren’t you that knife nerd?!
You’ll never pin a single thing on me, copper.
Idk man, in my experience laptops break down a hell of a lot faster than PCs
in reality, you’re the problem.
NO, IT’S THE TECH INDUSTRY, NOT ME, I’M PERFECTLY FINE!
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.
my 13 years old laptop works good as server. Sometimes he fell asleep when I watch a movie with Jellyfin but it’s okey.
Yeah, I have a 5-year old and a 15-year old laptop downstairs acting as servers, and they are runnjng GREAT.
I’m using my old laptop as a PleX server. It does pretty well. It has a GTX1050 in it, so not too bad. Saves me having to put real hardware in my NAS
a gtx1050 is so much better than any gpu ive ever had lmao
The mobile GPUs aren’t quite as impressive as the desktop counterparts.
That’s pretty wild tbh, it’s old. I got it for gaming back in the day before I had a desktop.
i do live in brazil so its hard to get good hardware because os shipping and everythings supposed to be around 5x more expensive than stuff in the us (though in practice, its way worse than that)
my brother got lucky and got an rtx 2060 super at the end of the pandemic. the best gpu ive ever had was a gtx750 ti that simply stopped working, meaning im now stuck with no gpu, an i5 6500 and 16GB of ram (my brother got himself more ram and sold a 16GB stick to me that he was using)
5x more expensive
So, a number of countries, including Brazil, have VAT, which is considerably higher than US sales tax. Looking online, it looks like Brazil has 17%-19% VAT, and sales tax in the US, aside from a few states that don’t have it, is usually in the 6%-9% range.
And I can believe that for some products, maybe localization for Portuguese costs something, and economy of scale is less.
But how can it possibly be 5x? That seems far higher than anything that I could imagine producing. Some countries have protective tariffs to subsidize local industry, but I’m pretty sure that Brazil isn’t big in the PC hardware business.
googles
Okay, this is a decade old. They cite other taxes as some of that:
https://thenextweb.com/news/from-brazil-cost-brazil-profit-why-electronics-expensive-Brazil
Taxation is a recurring theme when you ask Brazilians about the cost of many imported goods. To take an example, the Brazilian website iG published an infographic on Apple products’ tax burden, and noted that the different taxes hitting the iPad add up to almost 55%.
So, that’s pretty hefty. Still not 400%, though.
This is where ‘Lucro Brasil’ (“Profit Brazil”) comes into play. Coined in reference to ‘Custo Brasil,’ it denounces the fact that structural problems often hide abusive margins at all levels, which most Brazilian consumers aren’t aware of.
While it is always difficult to find out about distributors’ and manufacturers’ margins, several details seem to confirm this suspicion. For instance, 60% taxes don’t fully explain why items can be twice as expensive in Brazil, and why tax breaks take so long to be reflected, Gizmodo Brasil highlighted in a recent article.
Okay, but why higher margins?
According to many analysts, the Brazilian elite may have its share of responsibility here. In practical terms, a high price tag has become a selling point for some, the anthropologist Roberto da Matta explained in an interview:
“When I was living in the US, I was running once when I saw then president George W. Bush, running as well, with security guards. He was using the same Nike shoes as I was. Here in Brazil, it’s hard to picture such a scene. Because objects still very much reflect the social segment of their owners. The sneakers, the car, the restaurant aren’t valued only for what they are, but also as status symbols. This is why it is more expensive to have dinner in Rio or São Paulo than in New York.”
I could maybe buy that for luxury goods – that’s a thing, Veblen goods, but I don’t think that most computer hardware probably qualifies.
Martin’s comment is a reference to reports that Foxconn is now manufacturing Apple products in its Brazilian plants – a piece of news that didn’t have any major impact on their price tags.
Hmm. That might be an argument that protectionist policy is involved.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/brazil-is-among-the-worlds-most-expensive-countries-to-buy-an-iphone/
Brazil is among the world’s most expensive countries to buy Apple products, according to a new report looking at 20 countries worldwide, published by bank BTG Pactual.
The prices of imported electronics in Brazil are among the highest of the countries listed in the report and are justified the argument that the Latin country is a “tough environment for foreign players”, who have to deal with “challenging and structural issues.”
Such problems include high import taxes, complexities and bureaucracy for imports and bottlenecks around logistics. According to the report, that means players with local manufacturing operations will get the upper hand in the years to come.
Yeah, that’s specifically referencing imports too.
My 2012 desktop PC died the other day.
I took out all her parts and determined that the fault was with the power supply and with a wonky pci shield on the wifi card. Replaced the psu and straighten the shield with pliers, reapply thermal compound for fun, and bam, shes back.
Its an i73770k lga1155 socket, with 16g DDR3 RAM. They dont make lga1155 sockets anymore, or DDR3 ram, so I would have been out $1600 to replace the CPU, motherboard, and RAM.
But now, she might have another 5 years in her yet. Im determined to keep her around until she’s old enough to vote at least.
My laptop will be old enough to vote next year
I’m pretty sure you could get a full brand new desktop that is more powerful for much less than $1600…
Probably, but I wouldn’t settle for something that’s just more powerful, Id want to spend the money to get higher-end current-gen hardware that will last me another 15 years, including upgrading to a good M.2 drive and better GPU. In AUD Id probably be spending at least $2k.
In fact I still have the birth certificate for my current PC, and I spent $1500 on it in 2012 dollars.
Way to go. Keep het alive.
At least for me, both my laptop (daily driver) and desktop would be considered old by this comic (2014 and 2017 respectively). Neither of them are struggling with the tasks I mostly use them for (writing notes, programming, light gaming on my desktop).
The only things they are struggling at, are modern video codecs and the ABSOLUTELY BLOATED shitshow that is today’s Internet experience.
If you use an ad blocker it’ll speed up your web performance dramatically
I am already using uBO on Firefox on both machines, as well as a Pi-Hole on my network for devices unable to obtain adblockers.
to be fair, everything struggles with software decoding on modern HEVC codecs (yes i realize HEVC is technically H265 but that’s a stupid fucking name, and i refuse to use HEVC and AVC as anything other than generics for the class of codec they’re in because that’s the only thing that makes sense)
And the internet, so like. None of this is “new”
At least he looks like he’s enjoying making music =)
Far more than comfort, we old men want most to be useful.
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
look at the laptop, he’s so happy.
Just enjoying the tunes, and the light workload, content as can be.
I have a 14 year old laptop that runs like a top with debian 12 on it.
Same with mine, i’m only still to dumb to get it using the old nvidia gpu instead of the intel graphics. Didn’t take the time yet to look further into it
How about installing Gentoo on it?
Not sure the 0.01s of reduced login time is worth the 30 hours it’ll take to build the kernel.
Why?
no one is seriously going to install gentoo on an old laptopt just to get it slightly faster. Gentoo is for hobbyists
With an SSD and enough RAM, I think old machines are more than capable for most basic task
Hell, I was gaming on a PC from 2013 all the way into 2022 (i5-4670K, 16GB DDR3 1600, and a 770, later upgraded to a 1070). My CPU stopped meeting the minimum requirement for games around 2018-2019, but it was enough to maintain 60 FPS @ 1080p in all but the most demanding titles. If a pile a money didn’t fall in my lap, I’d still be gaming on it today. But now that I’ve experienced 4K 120Hz gaming in HDR with Ray Tracing and DLSS, I could never go back. It was worth building a new PC for HDR and DLSS alone.
I’m on a similar train. My old PC can still run around half of new games but I can see the struggle. I’m considering going for a mid to low range laptop with Linux for everyday stuff and move my gaming to a Steam Deck. I ran the numbers and this option is around $750 cheaper than building a new mid level PC the way I want it. Unless I get a big downfall, the Deck+Laptop way is gonna have to do in the next year or so.
I’ve got an Acer Aspire One from 2008 running Mint that still works fine for web stuff and documents. Plays music too, hut not really video
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.
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
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)
probably? Kde is a little spicy, but i’d be surprised if it wasn’t usable to be honest.
I mean it’s not like I have a choice. If I stop using KDE then Konqi will come to my house at night and kill me in my sleep. I’ve sold my soul to them
i’ve used KDE for 4 years, jumped off prior to KDE6 to move to i3wm, and he hasn’t killed me yet.
I’m also a furry, so that’s probably why.
TL;DR just be a furry and it won’t be a problem lmao.
i have a couple of 11-12 release year thinkpads, they’re super capable, not productivity monsters, but they’re fine.
Thinkpad X230 of my dad still going strong with xfce.
My Mac mini serving as a movie server for nine years after retirement. If the movie starts stuttering back out and go back in, works every time.
2008 mbp still working well as my plex server! Ssd really helped it come back to life.
Nice! Mine developed a boot loop error of some kind years ago and never came back. Otherwise, those original Aluminum unibody systems are tanks.
Pfft, I make music with my ten year old laptop.
what kind?
BEEP BOOP BEEP BOOP!
Hmm. Human music. I like it!
Nailed it
Fruity loops?
Bitwig Studio, sound design and modulation focused DAW, with Linux support, from former Ableton devs*. A recent update does allow it to open FL projects (among others) but I haven’t tested that part.
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