Age before beauty: Why a decade-old laptop is more than enough

[Redaktion]

While buying the latest tech is tempting, older desktop and laptop computers are often more than enough to meet the demands of modern computing work. An older machine may require some time and tinkering to get up to par, but the payoff can definitely be worth the work and the results can be rather surprising.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Age-before-beauty-Why-a-decade-old-laptop-is-more-than-enough.858863.0.html

[Hunter2020]

Old laptops suck.  They can't play 4K videos.  But then an Android TV box that only costs $50 can make up for this deficiency...

[George]

Interesting, mostly...

I've been saying this for YEAR's but would add an additional layer to the filtering:

- What are your use cases that don't actually need or require a 'network' or much less the 'internet' at all?

- What are your use cases that DO require 'networking' with other computers and/or require 'internet access'?

Given that the modern "PC" or "Home Computer" has been around since the early 1980's[/b] and over the FOUR PLUS DECADES a VERY LARGE number of Operating Systems and Programs/Applications have been released to run on these "home computers", the reasons to replace a computer might involve:

- it is no longer functional at all
- it will not run the latest and greatest OS/software

Given that there are countless perfectly functional OLDER COMPUTERS (as you've mentioned), why would anyone purchase a new one?

Well as mentioned "it will not run the latest and greatest OS/software".

Why might this be important? For those that have use cases that involve communicating with OTHER computers and/or the INTERNET keeping a fully 'patched' computer OS+apps is less likely to be "infected" resulting in at least data loss, ID being stolen and/or other countless possible nasties.

However given that the "infection points" on computers are via: a network connection, infected media/files installed and/or opened on computer if your use case does not require/need a network connection and/or you don't exchange files or media with others then the likely hood of getting "infected" are ZERO to NONE.

Granted MOST people don't have a 'handful or more' aging (or NOT!) computers laying about to have 'special use cases' IE: 'offline only' and 'safe to stream'. :)

(this was typed on a 2013 13" MBP OSX 10.13.6)

:)

[Bizarro_NikoB]

"Linux is not the complicated boogeyman it once was"

Linux DEs are utter garbage and WILL NEVER EVER - mark my words ---> NEVER EVER be mainstream with the way they are currently developed and maintained. I'm so sick of neckbeards and dry eggs pushing there linux fanboy propaganda arguing it's a viable alternative when these distros can't hold a candle to apple/msft in terms of stability, reliability, and app availability and yes, I'm talking about the desktop enviroments not the servers running linux just to remove that talking point.

So sick of people lying about how its a great user experience yet never disclose just how much hoops they probably had to jump through just to get it stable let alone the constant breaking changes pushed via updates because of the elitist fragmented mindset of most linux maintainers Then there's the community that is so arrogant and toxic. Yeah no. 

Someone once said Linux DEs are like a hundred recipes for the "perfect mac and cheese" that are never as good as the box you buy from the store. Words have never been truer and its a shame, because it would be nice if there was a true legit third-party alternative to the MSFT/Apple monopoly but right now Linux DEs are not it.


"Linux is only free if your time is worthless"

[Gep]

I can certainly relate. I've been using my 2013 Lenovo yp510 for 12 years now. I had it retrofitted with an nvme booting drive and a 1 To ssd and an SLI Nvidia 785M (I think?) It runs like a charm, is somewhat noisy at the gills and is not Win 11 compatible (I don't care)
My use cases are surfing, playing online chess, watching YT videos and casual gaming (Crysis, remember?) This beast never failed me and I made it a personal challenge to make it last another 5 years (yeah, right)

[AAA1]

That old laptop uses less power than my way newer laptop i would kill for a 10w idle only get 3 hours of battery life

[indy]

"Linux is not the complicated boogeyman it once was"

Linux DEs are utter garbage and WILL NEVER EVER - mark my words ---> NEVER EVER be mainstream with the way they are currently developed and maintained. I'm so sick of neckbeards and dry eggs pushing there linux fanboy propaganda arguing it's a viable alternative when these distros can't hold a candle to apple/msft in terms of stability, reliability, and app availability and yes, I'm talking about the desktop enviroments not the servers running linux just to remove that talking point.

So sick of people lying about how its a great user experience yet never disclose just how much hoops they probably had to jump through just to get it stable let alone the constant breaking changes pushed via updates because of the elitist fragmented mindset of most linux maintainers Then there's the community that is so arrogant and toxic. Yeah no. 

Someone once said Linux DEs are like a hundred recipes for the "perfect mac and cheese" that are never as good as the box you buy from the store. Words have never been truer and its a shame, because it would be nice if there was a true legit third-party alternative to the MSFT/Apple monopoly but right now Linux DEs are not it.


"Linux is only free if your time is worthless"

Love how you limit it to desktop environment.

Linux already is the most popular OS, by far. It skipped the "DE" And went straight for server and mobile. And embedded. And pico. And virtual.

Yeah Mom&Pop don't use it on their laptop or desktop. Doesn't mean it sucks there, either.

[N.]

While I adore my lenovo x220s (plural), I finally stopped using them and bought a 3rd hand (correct) lenovo convertible. There is one key reason: battery. Yeah, they're quite cheap, though not as cheap as the author claims (around 25 - 35 EUR mark, and only that cheap if you buy off aliexpress), but they're all (ALL) - s***. I've bought about 4 in total, various brands, including those with glowing reviews, and they were all s***, regardless of their claims. They last 2hrs, if I was lucky, AND wear out to very low capacity after a few weeks' use, so near-instant landfill. I can't spend the rest of my life hunting for a 'good enough' battery, so I retired my lenovos, even though the swappable battery and hdd, and fantastic keyboard beats the s*** out of my 'current' model (which is already considered 'ancient' being made in 2018 and each and every newer version is worse in every possible aspect).

[jkhjhjbj]

both those laptops despite similar power consumption are underpowered (that macbook 2014 is what, 900/1200 geekbench? less that ARM singleboards for $50) and are hot as hell.
also yeah, you can replace hdd, wow. for another slow sata drive.

[Hotz]

also yeah, you can replace hdd, wow. for another slow sata drive.

Exchanging an HDD with a "slow" SATA SSD actually makes a big difference. It made a really big difference on my (also) 10 year old desktop computer. Everything installed and loaded up much faster then. I remember an Unreal Engine 4 game where a savegame previously took 2-3 minutes to load, and with a Sata SSD it was only 20 seconds. That was in fact "wow".

[Hotz]

and don't forget how all the HDD noises disappeared as well...

[ghm]

Linux DEs are utter garbage and WILL NEVER EVER - mark my words ---> NEVER EVER be mainstream

mac os is a unix system

[Bizarro_NikoB]

Love how you limit it to desktop environment.

Linux already is the most popular OS, by far. It skipped the "DE" And went straight for server and mobile. And embedded. And pico. And virtual.

Yeah Mom&Pop don't use it on their laptop or desktop. Doesn't mean it sucks there, either.

Exactly. On the server side it is rock solid. Number 1 choice in my opinion for servers. My critique was focused on the DEs which I don't think are as good as hyped in the tech sphere -  at least not in their current form. They're getting there but still need work and what they really need is for software companies to start offering linux compatability but that's a whole different conversation.

[NikoB]

I can certainly relate. I've been using my 2013 Lenovo yp510 for 12 years now. I had it retrofitted with an nvme booting drive and a 1 To ssd and an SLI Nvidia 785M (I think?) It runs like a charm, is somewhat noisy at the gills and is not Win 11 compatible (I don't care)
My use cases are surfing, playing online chess, watching YT videos and casual gaming (Crysis, remember?) This beast never failed me and I made it a personal challenge to make it last another 5 years (yeah, right)

No VP9 decoder and that's it, you can't watch YT in good quality on fhd screen - 4k@60fps is not available to you, because my Asus 2014 with i7 4700HQ can't play 4k@60fps VP9 also...

[sam2]

watch YT in good quality on fhd screen - 4k@60fps

What's so important you've found on YT that you want to watch it downsampled to not miss any of the precious details on that immensely huge 15 inch screen.
Maybe the reason you can't watch it in good quality is your old 2014 70% sRGB screen?