The magic of a ssd and a lightweight distro running xfce can even perk up an average system from 2010. Bonus points if you can upgrade the memory. You can probably still get to a login prompt in 20-30s, and cold boot to a link saved on the desktop playing music in under a minute.
That’s about $30 USD in parts. You will probably struggle with more intense tasks. We just replaced desktops with similar specs that were just barely able to run optimized Minecraft a couple years ago.
This is me with my 11 year old thinkpad t420, sometimes I’ll even ask it to play minecraft or holocure both of which it will mystically play just fine
Steams interface unironically runs worse on it than those two games
Steam has been gradually going down the route of becoming a “pretty” interface instead of a fast one, and it’s kind of sad. Excessive use of dynamic svgs for home page animations, dynamic gradients that slow everything down, and probably some backend changes too, and all baked in with the base UI so it’s less responsive than it was before, even on decent hardware. Seems like it all started with Big Picture and the gradual migration of that design style into the main client.
My 16 year old iMac valiantly can run roughly one application at a time, which is all I need it to do for background media while working
My Zune still playing
cough hack wheeze
“Is that all you got?”
I miss my Zune. Do you seriously still have one?
Yep. Mounted on the wall in my dad’s barn, playing an endless shuffle of my music from 15? Years ago.
I tied him up in my dad’s barn and it sings constantly
That what it sounds like.
My daily driver desktop is 8. It was $1100 back then. On it I work two ver-ry nerdy jobs.
I envy you where 10 years is a long time !
I use a 12 year old laptop as my daily driver, and use it to do high res video editing. A decade old computer these days is still highly capable.
Last year I still used to use a 16 year old laptop. It could even run Windows 11 just fine. I only tried Asphalt 9 and 8 on it as I don’t play games, but it ran well.
I still miss that laptop. I really wish it still worked.
What happened: I finally wanted to learn using 4NEC2. It doesn’t want to run on my new laptop, neither in VM nor WINE. But suddenly, the laptop kept shutting down randomly. Probably issue with the aftermarket battery. It still showed 80% of charge. At one point I said “That’s it. You shut down one more time, I am done and plugging you in.” (The adapter wasn’t with me, so I used it on battery.) It shut down.
I then plugged in the adapter, but it never turned on again. R.I.P.Asphalt 9 is from 2018. And it’s a mobile game ported to Windows.
Is it a Thinkpad?
Nope, MacBook Pro
Up until about a year ago my main gaming rig was a laptop from 2012. Toward the end I had to turn settings down (sometimes WAY down) but it still performed like a champ.
Everybody with a Thinkpad
X230 gang!
X220 too.
Just corebooted my X230T daily driver. I’ve had the x220 keyboard for years and just upgraded the WiFi card, too. I want to keep this thing running as long as possible!
My 12 year old thinkpad is still my daily driver.
Speakers stopped working 5 years ago tho. Only BT audio out, now.
You could probably open that up pretty easy and fix that I bet
This sort of thing is heavily dependent on how often they get away with pushing their luck.
With my luck, the moment I’d start fishing around inside the case, something would happen to make it refuse to boot or lose one or more of the RGB channels to the screen or something.
And the sound still wouldn’t work.
Meanwhile I’ll open my t420 for kicks, boots again every time
First thing that always went in every Thinkpad I’ve owned is the wireless card lol. Opposite issue for me.
T42 was instructable
deleted by creator
My Surface Pro 3 refuses to die despite the fans giving out, and YouTube plays like shit now thanks to the potato GPU.
Still use it everyday.
My surface pro 3 is easily one of the most reliable computers I’ve ever had.
My Surface 2 and Surface 3 both developed a hardware problems. :(
So it’s able to run fanless or did you fix it somehow?
It peaks about 90 degrees C when playing YouTube videos. The fan sort of ticks every 5 seconds or so but yeah, it’s still okay.
Looking over at my old Thinkpad X131e with those “I’m going to start a new project with you” eyes
Old laptops also make for great servers and hobby computers. If you don’t need the form factor of a pi or mini pc, throw Debian or whatever on an old laptop and play away! I’ve got jellyfin, my DNS, reverse proxy and an octoprint server running on mine. It’s the little heart of our network.
And, if it hasn’t gone bad, the unit has a built in UPS!
I was thinking about adding that, but I also don’t want anyone blaming their localized fireworks display on me if it does go bad.
IMO, one of the biggest risks of using a laptop as a server or some type of utility system is that you may not look at it regularly enough to see if the battery has a problem.
Go look at your hardware folks. Just stare at it for a few minutes every few months or more frequently. See if anything looks strange or different about it.
My laptop is still chugging along since 2011, and I totally feel this comic.
It got an SSD to really boost performance.
It still runs Windows 7.
I can’t create-react-app because I can’t upgrade node to the version it requires.
Chrome doesn’t update anymore.
This thing is robust and feels like I’ve had it forever.
I will be sad when it dies.
Do you have a few minutes to talk about our Lord and Saviour, Linus Torvalds?
Of course, God bless his kind soul, may the eternal peace lay on his lands
Rumor has it he isn’t actually a kind soul, just a nerd with a dream.
Verbally slaying the sinner is a form of kindness. Letting people break user space willy-nilly is not kind
I’ve never had any issues playing music on a 10 year old laptop
Yeah I was about to say I can play music on a single core Atom in an Acer Aspire One from 2008.
Pretty sure anything capable from the Windows XP era onwards could play an MP3.
Whether it run the bloated Chromium mess that the Spotify client is, is another matter.
I played MP3s on a 486DX4 100MHz. Barely. If anything else happened in the background, it would stutter.
I use Windows media player 8 to play music on my netbook from 2009. Works just fine
Hell, my winME lappy could do it withour breaking a sweat.
A 486 at 33MHz struggled but you could definitely do MP3 on any Pentium or higher.
Meanwhile, my two-year old Celeron not being able to reliably play a FLAC file without stuttering…
That’s what you get for buying a CeLOLron
I didn’t know about how well developed the second hand market was by now, and my budget was 200 euros. I’ll try to be more careful the next time.
You paid €200 for a celery stick!?!?
Dude.
Well, I didn’t know any better back then!
You mean a de-Celeron?
Might be something else, shouldn’t even a celeron be able to handle that?
It’s not fair to compare it to your decade-old i7
I love watching videos about plane crashes on my old tablet when I’m cooking or rinsing (non-native here, is that right for doing a dishwasher’s job by hand?).
Rinsing would just be running water on them without any soap.
I see, thanks
You rinse before you pit in the dush washer (only if it’s really bad though)
True.
I’ll join with Technology Connections in being that guy who says (in a friendly way, not condescending):
If you have to rinse your dishes ever then you’re using the wrong soap, have a reeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaally crappy dishwasher (like a multi decade old cheapo model that’s breaking), or are loading your washer wrong. I think TCs video showing literally cooked on cheese coming off of dishes is pretty good proof that no dish out there needs rinsing.
I used to think my dishwasher couldn’t handle most things without rinsing, then I realized one of my sprayers had been blocked up and i also switched to a powder soap and suddenly everything is clean as fuck without any other changes to my loading habits. This was on a model slightly cheaper than the one TC uses in his video, and was about 7 years old when I saw improvement.
This is not criticism or anything, but simply trying to spread awareness of a simple thing I know a lot of people are surprised by when I tell them. Many of us are wasting time and effort on rinsing shit that doesn’t need to be, free yourselves!
Heard, thanks!
Native speakers refer to it as “washing the dishes” (the full phrase). “Dishwashing” is technically correct but it’s also awkward and clunky.
This was spoken from an America-centric POV. Hopefully some other countries will weigh in.
Thank you
All the other replies sound very American, it’s “doing the washing up” or just “washing up”
I use the term “hand-washing dishes”.
“Washing dishes” or “doing the dishes”. 👍
Thank you
