10 years old would be 7th Gen Intel which is perfectly capable.
For anyone else budget conscious: you can get excellent laptops by looking for an 8th gen Intel laptops in pristine condition on eBay for <£150. This will be perfect for daily use, web, office, etc. If you need gaming then get a used Steam Deck OLED. This is suitable computing for a huge number of people's usecase.
If you are in the USA and are on public assistance, then https://pcsrefurbished.com/sales/salesHome is a great place, especially for laptops. My last laptop from here is a HP Zbook 15 Fury G8 with a Nvidia RTX A2000 for $175.
I just lost my ATI X1950XT yesterday after I bumped it installing a replacement HDD into my home servers raid cluster. RIP 20 year old GPU, you had a commendable service life
Mine's a 2006 HP Z600 workstation, proudly serving punk rock and The Room (2003) 24/7 on demand to me and me only, because neither my family or my friends want punk rock or The Room (2003)
Plug your old laptops into your living room TV, buy a wireless mouse/keyboard combo, and you’ve got the ultimate media machine that you have full control over. I always do this whenever I move.
I’ve thought about how any old pc would blow all those proprietary devices out of the water with their flexibility to play anything, any format, any source. And I’ve also thought I currently have too many old laptops. No idea how I didn’t put two and two together until your comment. Thank you!
Yeah, but maybe remove the battery if the thing can run without it just on mains power. Leaving a battery plugged in (especially an old one) is not the best idea.
I’ve got 3 Thinkpad 420s (nice) - released 2011ish - that I got for free last summer. They all run Linux Mint now. One runs Jellyfin, one runs Sonarr and Radarr, one runs Jackett and Transmission. Works great!
This is an upgrade from the 2010 Dell, which was free from a friend with no working screen and missing 5 keys that I had running all of that.
I recently revived an old EEEPC 1005P. I put Antix Linux on it and it's totally usable.
Firefox needed some tweaks (specifically reducing the process count) to make it run somewhat decently. It still doesn't do Youtube, but it works fine enough for programming in Kate, doing terminal stuff and other simple native apps. Electron apps are a bit of a pain on that thing.
It's a really nice little on-the-go device that I use to work on my hobby projects on the train when commuting to work. Super small, super light, 8h battery life.
What, why would a 10yo laptop struggle to play music? Or even a 20yo laptop, if the comic is a bit older already. Apart from the battery of course, but those take years to go tired, not decades.
And with those RAM prices - I for one am happy with my 13yo laptop.
My dual core thinkpad struggles hard with windows or youtube. Twitch is impossible on it even on linux mint. The biggest problem is no hardware decoding for modern codecs. The crappy dual core can't handle the software decoding.
I think it's about 13 years old now.
It's not the hardware that's the issue. The software keeps getting slower and more bloated because most programmers don't know how to write well optimized code anymore.
That falls under the category of "expectations." Run software contemporary to your machine and it'll fly just as fast as it ever did. Go ahead, slap Windows 98 on that bad boy.
This is a lot more true now than it was in the olden days of hard drive fragmentation and rapidly increasing minimum spec requirements. (For instance the computer my family bought in 1996 had a mind blowing 16mb of ram, Win ME released in 1999 with a 32mb RAM requirement.)
It runs okay, but starts to rattle under load and at random times.
I tried to get the fan replaced but couldn't find a replacement, in local stores or second hand parts market. I looked at online retailers but they wouldn't ship to my country. lol
Ten years? Up until recently I had a Core2Duo with 1GB RAM running Qobus in as a jukebox in the bedroom. But now he's gone, off to a better place, where he can finally rest. By which I mean I upgraded to 4GB and installed at a relative's house running Home Assistant.
I had a Core2Quad with 4GB of RAM as my home server until about 2 years ago. Home Assistant is what finally overloaded it. (I have a fairly large setup with a ton of integrations.)
Upgraded the desktop, now the old desktop is the server. I think it's already 10 years old.
Man, one more year, then my ThinkPad T25 will be 10 years old. It's still my workhorse that I use every day, and you can pry it from my cold, dead hands when I die.
My laptop is over ten years and it's still my main driver for work. I don't see the issue, it's not like I need suddenly other hardware if I do the same stuff.
Am I the only one who's old enough to remember CD-ROMs, and they used to be able to play CDs without an OS running? As long as they get power from the IDE power socket, you can put a CD inside and press on the physical "play" button on the panel of the CD-ROM.
Back in my early help desk days I had a manager tell me to disable the ability to listen to music on her employees computers. She felt they were slacking if listening to music.
If I remember, I didn't hear audio on the headphones after plugging them into the port on the front. I was trying to use it as a simple audio CD player.
I have a ten year old laptop as my NAS. It has some issues sometimes but it was a pretty cool project for tech I barely used anymore. Now I use it every day.
My Lenovo Y500 laptop from 2012 is still running. Windows 8.1 has surprisingly little memory footprint & runs all my old windows applications.
The speakers are pretty much gone & I had to swap my old HDD to a SATA SSD in 2023.
This thing's bulky, but it never let me down.
They really don't build things like they used to.
My iMac is 11 years old. Use it to WFH two days a week and it's running on Windows 11 (Rufus build that skips all the hardware checks). Have to use that OS as it's a domain joined device using the work VPN. Works great.
"All I can really do anymore is browse the Internet and maybe stream some music."
"And that's enough for me, old friend."
That comic must be 10 years old, because 10 years old laptops these days would be drawn ripped and making pushups
10 years old would be 7th Gen Intel which is perfectly capable.
For anyone else budget conscious: you can get excellent laptops by looking for an 8th gen Intel laptops in pristine condition on eBay for <£150. This will be perfect for daily use, web, office, etc. If you need gaming then get a used Steam Deck OLED. This is suitable computing for a huge number of people's usecase.
If you are in the USA and are on public assistance, then https://pcsrefurbished.com/sales/salesHome is a great place, especially for laptops. My last laptop from here is a HP Zbook 15 Fury G8 with a Nvidia RTX A2000 for $175.
Older thinkpads are still a great deal too. Just have to stick to the actual business ones and not the consumer ones.
My home server has a 12 year old cpu, and that bad boy just keeps chugging along running 24/7.
I just lost my ATI X1950XT yesterday after I bumped it installing a replacement HDD into my home servers raid cluster. RIP 20 year old GPU, you had a commendable service life
Mine's a 2006 HP Z600 workstation, proudly serving punk rock and The Room (2003) 24/7 on demand to me and me only, because neither my family or my friends want punk rock or The Room (2003)
Anyway, how's your sex life?
Ha ha ha! What a story, Swab!
Don't worry about it
my PC is a 2013 HP. 4 years ago I got fancy and bought a gtx 1070ti. both are enough for me and have been running well.
I'm still sad the mobo for my i7 920 died. That CPU was a beast. Maybe one day I'll get a 1366 server mobo and set it up as a NSA.
Nine year old CPU in mine, even hosting Minecraft servers for 10+ people with zero issues.
Same but mine's a 2011 Mac mini with Ubuntu
I put Linux mint on my 2016 laptop. It runs great.
2016? But the comic said ten year old lapto.... Fuck
It keeps getting worse, too. The nineties wasn't that long ago. I swear.
Just one decade or sth.
…
Right?
10 year old isn’t that old - 20 is the new 10
I love how affectionate this comic is. I'm really feeling for the old laptop, but I'm feeling the appreciation and understanding from the human
He's just a little guy doin his best!
This was a great way to write out the feelings I had. Just so wholesome
Plug your old laptops into your living room TV, buy a wireless mouse/keyboard combo, and you’ve got the ultimate media machine that you have full control over. I always do this whenever I move.
I’ve thought about how any old pc would blow all those proprietary devices out of the water with their flexibility to play anything, any format, any source. And I’ve also thought I currently have too many old laptops. No idea how I didn’t put two and two together until your comment. Thank you!
Yeah, but maybe remove the battery if the thing can run without it just on mains power. Leaving a battery plugged in (especially an old one) is not the best idea.
I do have a used ThinkPad what I bought out from my workplace for dirt cheap. Maybe it's time to look into buying a TV.
My laptop I bought new in 2012 is running my Jellyfin server. And working great.
Someone else's old windows 7 laptop for mine. Works perfectly.
I put Linux on mine because Windows 7 quit working on it years ago.
It has Linux now but I don't know exactly how old it is so I call it by its original os
I’ve got 3 Thinkpad 420s (nice) - released 2011ish - that I got for free last summer. They all run Linux Mint now. One runs Jellyfin, one runs Sonarr and Radarr, one runs Jackett and Transmission. Works great!
This is an upgrade from the 2010 Dell, which was free from a friend with no working screen and missing 5 keys that I had running all of that.
Somebody give that poor thing Linux already! D:
Laptop afterwards: From the moment I understood the weakness of the batch, it disgusted me.
Where there is service, there is life.
My 12 year old Hackintosh MBP is doing great with Ubuntu. Mid-2014 machine and it's still my daily driver!
My stock 2016 MacBook is still running strong.
I recently revived an old EEEPC 1005P. I put Antix Linux on it and it's totally usable.
Firefox needed some tweaks (specifically reducing the process count) to make it run somewhat decently. It still doesn't do Youtube, but it works fine enough for programming in Kate, doing terminal stuff and other simple native apps. Electron apps are a bit of a pain on that thing.
It's a really nice little on-the-go device that I use to work on my hobby projects on the train when commuting to work. Super small, super light, 8h battery life.
Ah YouTube ain’t worth it anymore anyway.
What, why would a 10yo laptop struggle to play music? Or even a 20yo laptop, if the comic is a bit older already. Apart from the battery of course, but those take years to go tired, not decades.
And with those RAM prices - I for one am happy with my 13yo laptop.
It's running Windows 11.
My dual core thinkpad struggles hard with windows or youtube. Twitch is impossible on it even on linux mint. The biggest problem is no hardware decoding for modern codecs. The crappy dual core can't handle the software decoding. I think it's about 13 years old now.
Words of wisdom from my father, an engineer:
"The computer isn't any slower than the day you bought it. Only your expectations of it have changed."
It's not the hardware that's the issue. The software keeps getting slower and more bloated because most programmers don't know how to write well optimized code anymore.
No, they definitely do know how to write faster software. They’re just not paid for that. They’re paid to write software faster, that’s all.
That falls under the category of "expectations." Run software contemporary to your machine and it'll fly just as fast as it ever did. Go ahead, slap Windows 98 on that bad boy.
My C-64 still boots up instantly, just as it did on day one. Far faster than Windows could ever dream.
Surpised the capacitors havent borked. You are lucky it runs.
This is a lot more true now than it was in the olden days of hard drive fragmentation and rapidly increasing minimum spec requirements. (For instance the computer my family bought in 1996 had a mind blowing 16mb of ram, Win ME released in 1999 with a 32mb RAM requirement.)
The laptop I use daily is 16 years old and still going fine.
Fuck it do the linux meme and make it into a web server!
I suggest MPD i love using old hardware to stream my music around the house
My main laptop is 11 years old.
poor old fan noises
They're not old, they're veterans, and probably running fine
Meanwhile I had 2 year old Segotep case fans start to rattle on startup
It runs okay, but starts to rattle under load and at random times.
I tried to get the fan replaced but couldn't find a replacement, in local stores or second hand parts market. I looked at online retailers but they wouldn't ship to my country. lol
Damn :-/
Ten years? Up until recently I had a Core2Duo with 1GB RAM running Qobus in as a jukebox in the bedroom. But now he's gone, off to a better place, where he can finally rest. By which I mean I upgraded to 4GB and installed at a relative's house running Home Assistant.
I had a Core2Quad with 4GB of RAM as my home server until about 2 years ago. Home Assistant is what finally overloaded it. (I have a fairly large setup with a ton of integrations.)
Upgraded the desktop, now the old desktop is the server. I think it's already 10 years old.
still rocking the x230 from 2013 😎
got my xps 9560 and enough parts to make her run for another two decades.
Looks so pleasant in the last panel like "awwwwyiss, still got it~"
This is my 16 year old laptop.
Fresh OS install can do wonders. Especially if you switch to a lower resource intensive one.
Man, one more year, then my ThinkPad T25 will be 10 years old. It's still my workhorse that I use every day, and you can pry it from my cold, dead hands when I die.
10? I'm using a 14 year old laptop for school and it gets through it quite well, even the original battery still does 3 hours.
My laptop is over ten years and it's still my main driver for work. I don't see the issue, it's not like I need suddenly other hardware if I do the same stuff.
My laptop is 9 years old this summer and it's an absolute beast. It never gives me any trouble
I have another that's 7 years old and was crappy from day one
Am I the only one who's old enough to remember CD-ROMs, and they used to be able to play CDs without an OS running? As long as they get power from the IDE power socket, you can put a CD inside and press on the physical "play" button on the panel of the CD-ROM.
Oh, yeah! They had a play button next to the tray button, and a headphone jack with a volume wheel. I haven't thought about those in forever.
Back in my early help desk days I had a manager tell me to disable the ability to listen to music on her employees computers. She felt they were slacking if listening to music.
Indeed. I tried to run one without an IDE plugged in (just MOLEX) and it didn't work :/
Do you mean it didn't play the CD inside? Do you hear it running past the disc-identification phase and idles?
If I remember, I didn't hear audio on the headphones after plugging them into the port on the front. I was trying to use it as a simple audio CD player.
I daily a Dell Precision 690 in my living room.
I have a ten year old laptop as my NAS. It has some issues sometimes but it was a pretty cool project for tech I barely used anymore. Now I use it every day.
My Lenovo Y500 laptop from 2012 is still running. Windows 8.1 has surprisingly little memory footprint & runs all my old windows applications. The speakers are pretty much gone & I had to swap my old HDD to a SATA SSD in 2023.
This thing's bulky, but it never let me down. They really don't build things like they used to.
I have a roughly 26 years old pentium III laptop still in working order. Those 256MB of memory are still going strong.
Is there any way I could turn this into a sticker (would go on my old ThinkPad T540p)?
My iMac is 11 years old. Use it to WFH two days a week and it's running on Windows 11 (Rufus build that skips all the hardware checks). Have to use that OS as it's a domain joined device using the work VPN. Works great.