this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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when they say "older" PCs they're talking about machines with CPUs that are over 14 years old now.
You'd need to have replaced that CPU by now anyway.
Hard disagree. If this was the 80s or the 90s, you would have a case. But nowadays? 14 year old PCs are quite capable for many everyday uses.
The only people trying to convince you that you have to upgrade things every other year are the ones who sell them.
IDK, it's a far cry from "dropping support for stuff 14+ years old" to "we're going to coerce you into buying new hardware every other year".
I bought a laptop at the beginning of 2010 and used it until spring of 2021. It was long overdue for replacement by then, so even that wouldn't have been affected by this.
What made it long overdue for replacement, though?
Because I bet a mom or pops who only browse facebook could (technically) still use it for five more years*.
*Though facebook is not the best example because they are constantly bloating their own product.
For me: I like to play games. It was still fine for games like Dwarf Fortress or Civilization, and it could handle Factorio decently well (enough to launch a rocket, not enough for a megabase, heh).
For my mom? IDK, I was already pushing it with how long I stayed on Windows 7. I'm not sure that this particular laptop would have been a good hand-me-down in 2021.
Finally...I have to repeat: I bought the laptop in 2010. I got eleven years out of it for a type of device that most people replace every 2-3 years. Why isn't that good enough for you?
You're right. 11 years is a good run.
Thank you!
I was pretty thrilled at how much use I got out of that laptop. I originally picked it up as a companion machine to a desktop, but about a year later, I switched over to using the laptop almost exclusively. I got a docking station and hooked it up to my desktop monitors, and all was well. It did limit the games I could play, but hey, I guess you could call me a "patient gamer".
I did have to repair it a couple of times -- I replaced both the cooling fan and the hard drive around 2015-2017.
It was funny, what finally spurred me to start looking for a new machine was a free giveaway of Total War: Shogun 2 on Steam back in 2020. Free game? New computer!
I got a core 2 duo (3gb of ram and a HDD as a boot drive, really ancient I know) computer, it's the only computer I have and I absolutely hate it since it sucks, even with Linux (xfce as a desktop) it takes so long to boot (usually 3 to 4 minutes, windows took like 6 to 7) and not to mention it being so laggy it struggles with launching Firefox and for example a file browser at the same time, and loading a webpage also takes a long time (around 20 seconds for Google, YouTube about 30 s)
Yeah, these computers are really just unusable even for really lightweight work, yeah "upgrade to a SSD, it will be blazing fast", wouldn't that just speed up the boot time? The least important thing? Since like I can just walk somewhere and then come back before it boots, but when I'm waiting for a webpage to load or a program to load up it's really that I do have to wait there, doing nothing in the meantime
An SSD really is the solution. You believe it just speeds up boot time, but it does speed up nearly everything else too.
Your Webpage? Your Browser loads it, stores new data into the cache and stalls while waiting for the HDD. Or it knows elements are in the cache and stalls waiting for them.
You click on the application menu? You PC tries to load 20 icons, tiny amounts of data an SSD has ready in a microsecond. Your HDD takes a full second because the seek between the 20 places where the icons are on the HDD takes so long.
I have some very old PCs I manage (mainly for relatives) and one couple uses a Core 2 Duo E6400 which should be quite similar to your PC. This PC is very usable for daily browsing with Ubuntu 22.04, boot time is about 25 seconds, then about 10 seconds to load up ebay. (I admit I optimized boot time quite a bit) The other PC they have is even slower than that, I just do not remember the exact CPU right now. That one is even used for old browser games similar to candy crush.
Of course it is not what I would use given the choice. I want to compile code in seconds, watch videos in glorious 4k and play a 3D game from time to time. But for them it works perfectly well, so well that they deny my offers to upgrade them
What makes you think that an SSD won't help with the rest of the operations?
Every time I upgrade a computer from HDD to SSD, it injects new life to it.
IMO, it'll probably still be slow at a lot of things. The gen-6 i5-U laptops we at my job use have SSDs and 8GB ram (granted, also running windows because required for some software) and they're still really slow compared to things like my personal desktop and laptop. Boot times are fine at least, but web browsing isn't as quick and responsive as I'm used to (<2 seconds per page). They probably take more like 10 pages to load pretty basic pages (no videos).
Still, probably a ton faster with an SSD than without one.
It sounds like your machine is full of crap. Or maybe the hardware you're using is shitty.
Or maybe you're giving your machine too much to do at once. Or maybe the antivirus you have is shitty, I don't know I haven't seen what you do with your system. I don't have any problems with my windows machine, because I know how to use it and take care of it.
It would help the boot time but also loading software. But I agree a Core 2 Duo is pretty much cooked at this point.
I just replaced a Core 2 Quad in my server, which mostly is a file server and database, that sort of thing. It was doing fine until I started trying to do virtual machines on it (running Home Assistant), and that just killed it. But as a machine I'd be using directly? Nah.
My desktop machine was an i5 from about 2015 and was fine, but I recently upgraded the desktop and put the guts of that in the server.
Firefox is full of bloat now try using librewolf instead
You can have it, but expecting modern windows to run seems a bit silly. It's a for sale product not a community supported hobby project.
If it was worth supporting for old ATMs or POS terminals, Ms probably would. But the people with those systems aren't paying for windows updates.
I never said 14 year old PCs have to support modern Windows as it stands now.
But anyway. With all the billions Microsoft has as its operating budget, why can't it launch a Windows tailored to low spec machines? Not profitable enough. That's why.
My old system was starting to run like shit anyway I had it for over 10 years
Hardware doesn't last forever and older hardware is vulnerable to more things.
It certainly would be nice if you never needed to upgrade anything and could just run the same hardware forever, but we don't live in that world.
I get it, there's that old saying "what Intel giveth Microsoft taketh away" but I've said it several times in this thread, you need to periodically upgrade hardware anyway to stay safer from certain kinds of malware
The malware part is the sad truth. You're right.
Why?
Progress mate. Shit gets old because we came up with better shit (thats gonna get old too) so you toss it and forget about it. Repeat until planet fucked.
harvest all the gold and copper from your old hardware.
Well, no. There's no reason you should, plenty of uses for a 14yo Linux PC around the house
Yeah you could just switch to Linux on an old PC like that
The stuff that Microsoft is making mandatory for Windows 11 is hardware security features older hardware is more vulnerable to malware that runs at deeper levels of your system
If you want to be secure at the hardware level...or at least more secure at the hardware level, you need newer hardware
Core isolation for example won't work on hardware that's incompatible with windows 11
A lot of malware can't run on a Windows machine once core isolation is enabled. Like I always say, if it won't run with core isolation enabled, it's probably malware