elders

All I have is a 13 year old laptop, and I use it basically all day most days. It's plays music and movies etc with no issues. Cloud pc for gaming, which also works perfectly. It really doesn't like youtube, though, and it sounds like a jet engine every time system and app updates start to download. Can't afford to get anything better anyway. A friend gave it to me after it died on him and he got a new one, wasn't hard to fix. I cried when I got it because it improved my life a lot, just being able to do basic things.

Have a hug!
- Thank you, I needed that!
My man, I am glad you have such a dependable machine and I hope that, in the future, it will be by choice and not need rhat you use old devices. Hold in there!
Have you tried blowing out the fan? After 13 years it might be all gunked up
- Yeah, I try to keep it clean. I'm pretty sure the fan has been warped, so one of the blades drags against the housing a bit, and I don't have the tools to open it up that much to try to fix it. It only happens at high fan speeds, though, and that doesn't happen often enough to be truly annoying.
Looks like your problem is Windows. Linux works much better on old hardware.
- Yeah, I've been meaning to get rid of Windows for a while now. Haven't really used Linux since like 2010, so it feels like a lot to get into. Already saved some websites, articles, and lemmy posts with good info, though.
  One reason I haven't done it yet is because I did manage to save up a bit of money (only like $300) after about a decade of never being able to feed myself at the end of each month. The plan was to get a steam deck, something I've deeply wished for ever since I heard about it, and keep the laptop only as a backup. But I got robbed... forgot my card at a grocery store self checkout, and someone took it and somehow managed to use it. Had just gotten money for that month, so no bills had been paid yet. Not only did I lose the saved money, but I had to take out a loan to pay my rent, etc. So any dream of a steam deck or anything else is dead, it will take years to pay off that loan.
- Does Nvidia play better now with linux? I run a 14 yr old laptop (Asus k40in) but it's got Nvidia graphics, and it didn't work well last time I tried Linux on it. (several years ago now)
  
  It's on 24/7, running win10 now and does ok, but I mainly use it for my yard cameras and light surfing when my main pc is busy doing other things.
Idk if invidious would be lighter that normal youtube, but maybe that would work?
cloud pc for gaming

can you say more about that pls?
- I use GeForce Now. It fits my needs and the games I like to play. Why pay for my own gaming rig when I can rent it and let others cover the upgrading cost?
- There are a few services that allow you to play with the actual game being rendered on remote computers, while your pc only shows the image and sends the input commands. I think the more popular ones are xcloud and geforce now. There are also a few smaller services that allow you to run anything you'd like, without limitations.
- I use Shadow, you literally get a high-end PC you stream to any device in real time and can do whatever you want with. Other cloud gaming services only streams the games, so you can't use mods, emulators, etc. Currently playing Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora on max settings, and it's buttery smooth. I also use it for anything else that my laptop can't handle like image and video editing, 3d modelling and rendering.
There are multiple clients to browse and play Youtube without jet engine tho.
I hope you get to get a fancy new one soon and your old laptop friend keeps chugging along as before! 🙏
Incredible that a laptop as old as me is still usable

Everybody with a Thinkpad

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
- First thing that always went in every Thinkpad I've owned is the wireless card lol. Opposite issue for me.
T42 was instructable
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!

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.

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.

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.
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

This is the weird, sentimental attitude that has me buried in clutter

Praise sentimentality ... I've done my best to maintain and keep running almost every laptop, tablet, phone and PC I've ever owned. A few just died because of dead main boards, short circuits or mechanical failure. The ones that work are all gathering dust in the closet, basement or storage space but they all work. I use one as a reader, one is parked next to the couch so I have access to a laptop while watching TV, one's in the basement workshop, one gets moved to the garage in the springtime and the rest just sit on the ready for whenever I think of using them.
Buried in clutter yes but it also got me into electronic repair and frugality so I can't say it doesn't have its merits, wish it were easier to keep clean though.
Yes. Kill sentimentality, it's the only way to break free.

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'm tired, boss.

Shut up! I bought you to obey, not to mouth off.

Wholesome-ness on the internet? In this economy?!

i daily an 11 year old ThinkPad. it's fast and does everything i need it to do. buying new is for suckers

I dailied on my 2012 self-built gaming PC. Was good but expensive. Got a used MacBook Air, its cheap now.
- That's what I'm still doing now. I upgraded the RAM a couple years ago and the GPU last year, both with cheap older parts that were about $100.
  
  The main problem I've run into so far is that Blender no longer runs since they only support CPUs ten years old or newer. But I don't do that stuff anymore really anyway.
Suckers and anyone who wants/needs a warranty... Like businesses.
- ...a.k.a. suckers. 🙃
Yeah, once my Zephyrus dies I’ve decided that it’s my last “new” laptop that I buy. Sure, it can play games, but my usage has been drifting more “casual” over the years. For the top end of my computing: I really don’t need much to compile stuff and run chitubox.

How easy is it to get replacement parts for a ThinkPad?
- Likely the easiest
Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever bought a new PC/Laptop. It's always been used. Had only one problem with a phone I got for half the proce of all the others so it's kind of my fault...

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?).

"Washing dishes" or "doing the dishes". 👍
- Thank you
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
Rinsing would just be running water on them without any soap.
- You rinse before you pit in the dush washer (only if it's really bad though)
- I see, thanks
I use the term "hand-washing dishes".
All the other replies sound very American, it's "doing the washing up" or just "washing up"

A heads-up to anyone running old laptops; buy genuine replacement batteries while they're available!

I have an aging XPS 13 and of course, Dell have discontinued the battery line. Opened it up one day and every cell had puffed out. It took buying a couple of fakes before finally finding a decent reseller on eBay who stocked what I needed. The fake batteries were not recognised by Dell's hardware detection system thing, I imagine lots of other manufacturers might implement the same feature.

Or don't buy from manufacturers that do this
- Yea, but what if you already have a laptop from such a manufacturer?
Given how dell AC adapters are the only ones that I know of with an extra wire that functionally just acts as drm, it's not surprising they do the same with batteries.

Even HP's elitebook I got (6th Gen Intel CPUs) work no problem with third party batteries and HP has all of the drm printer nonsense. Curiously if their modern elitebook have battery drm yet.

oddly wholesome

Old laptops will still run pretty good if you run lightweight Linux distribution and give it some RAM upgrade and maybe SSD as well. I still wouldn't use them as my main computer, as I'd rather have a lot better specs and ability to run Win10/Win11 flawlessly, but it's still a good option.

Ability to run windows? Why?

My ten year old laptop has 4 gigs of RAM and can barely boot windows. It can run Linux pretty well but it still only has 4 gigs of RAM

My 12 years old netbook has 1 gig of RAM.

Still has its use for simple media.
- Netbook Gang. Bring back netbooks, best computers that ever were.
So you've got half a 2023 Macbook Pro?
I'm rocking an ancient i7 Elitebook from 2011 or so that I maxed out to 32 GB of RAM. I bought it from a business surplus place on eBay for like $100 7-8 years ago. The screen resolution sucks and it has no biometric features but I slapped an SSD in there, removed the battery, and now it's my Linux staging desktop.
- You count lack of biometrics as a drawback?

I let my brother use mine to play Minecraft.

Here, bro. Here's your laptop
- Pay me back some other time.
Tf when your 10-year old laptop can still handle Minecraft. Mine freezes from just looking at it funny.

Got a little better once I wiped it completely and installed Kubuntu, but it's still not really in a great shape
- You might be able to play Minetest. It's an open-source engine/launcher for games similar to Minecraft, but it's better optimized.
  
  If you want a very Minecraft-like experience, you can install the MineClone2 game (from within Minetest).
  
  Of course, if you're attached to specific game worlds or friends on Minecraft, those may be more difficult to migrate...
- yeah it stutters but i got it to playable framerate. (60-70 fps) (performance mods are pretty much REQUIRED, get sodium and like 50 other fabric performance mods,, you'll need all of 'em)
  it has a 4 core 4 thread (no hyperthreading) 2ghz amd a6 and 6 gb of ddr3 ram, out of which ~4.5 is usable
  also it has a terrible hdd which I don't feel like replacing.
  arch with gnome takes 2 minutes to boot, pop os with kde used to take around 5-6 minutes. (windows is painfully slow btw, around 10-30 minutes to cold boot, fast boot or hibernation is not that bad tho)
- Dust it out? Or is it one of those that isn't possible to open and maintain at all?
  
  I've had old laptops perform almost like new when I remove the mat of hair on their heat sinks.
- The game is a little choppy without sodium, its an old Thinkpad from 2013 that refuses to die.

Looking over at my old Thinkpad X131e with those “I’m going to start a new project with you” eyes

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.

I've never had any issues playing music on a 10 year old laptop

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.
- Hell, my winME lappy could do it withour breaking a sweat.
- 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
Yeah I was about to say I can play music on a single core Atom in an Acer Aspire One from 2008.

haha, reminds me of when I'd compile Firefox on my 12yo computer.
never felt its old age because Debian rocks.

There's something oddly wholesome about this comic.

17 year old Dell here. Threw a SSD and Linux on it and that damn thing boots faster than most brand new Desktops. Absolutely enough to surf the web, listen to music, watch videos or do the usual Linux stuff (ssh, etc.). You can even somewhat game on it via sunshine/moonlight.

I did the same with a Dell Wyse thin client laptop I acquired from work. Upgraded the RAM, popped a larger SSD into it, and installed Debian. Thing works great for the basics and I just RDP into my desktop for more intensive tasks.

Meanwhile, my two-year old Celeron not being able to reliably play a FLAC file without stuttering...

It's not fair to compare it to your decade-old i7
Might be something else, shouldn’t even a celeron be able to handle that?
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.

This is very well timed for me. I just acquired myself a convenient ancient laptop by installing Linux on a circa 2014 chrome book. It can chug when playing videos, but great for general use.

I love this, so wholesome. I have a 2009 Mac mini I’m still using sometimes

Man I feel that in my bones.

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.

It's nice to have a purpose:-).

"We are taking you to the dump today, 10 year old laptop! Ransack you for raw materials! I'm going to jam a screwdriver right through your CPU!"

I've got a 13 year old probook 5330m. It's running Lubuntu, with no working battery these days, but it's fine other than that.

Same here. My old graphics chip wouldnt boot with anything else (I could have searched for the driver somewhere) except lxqt. Thats why I chose lubuntu.
- First time hearing lubuntu! Thanks for mentioning it. I'll try this on my old laptop.

My 2014 Toshiba i7 still chugs along. Technically it's two laptops in one as the first one if it was rebooted while hot the GPU would go all 1024x768 in the top left corner. The replacement mainboard I got ended up being an AMD one but if I enable the AMD chip in device manager it simply dies so it uses the onboard Intel HD graphics instead.

1GB SSD, plus 2GB HDD in an optical bay adapter.

It's on its third battery - works for about an hour but jumps to 7% within a minute of running on battery, so if I put it to sleep etc it won't go again without power.

1GB SSD, plus 2GB HDD in an optical bay adapter.

Hmm...
- Why Hmm?

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 !

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.

Smiles in Thinkpad.

You feel bad for zis little laptop.

This is because you crazy. It has no feelings. It is just a machine.

The first (and last) surface product I bought was the pro 3, and I still find uses for it today. I'm planning on making it a media hub for my workout machine when I get that set up. I need to clear some space before I can put that together.

I recently purchased an older gen (refurb) framework 13 and it sure is quick. A bit costly, but hopefully the last full laptop I'll need to buy.

My desktop is an older (purchased used) Dell high end desktop system, which I dropped CPU/RAM/SSDs into and augmented with a Nvidia RTX card. Runs like a champ. Built in ~2016 or so... It was like 5 years old when I got my hands on it.

I still have my ~15 year old Alienware... I think the M15x, which was a pre-Dell acquisition laptop. From college. Which still works but probably needs some coaxing to get up and running again. That was the last "new" system I purchased. I learned my lesson then to not buy new.

I also have a collection of older servers and stuff and I run a homelab on dated enterprise equipment. It needs an upgrade as the main components are over 10 years old (except the drives), and it's showing its age. Looking at getting a refurb/used Dell FX2s chassis because it's more upgradeable than the alternatives and should save space and power.

The only warning I will give is that low end consumer systems are going to be garbage, whether they're new or not. When buying a used prebuilt, I highly recommend finding a used business system.

RE your last paragraph: does this apply to gaming or just as a general office work machine?
- In general, if you are looking for a system to play games with, building your own is the best option, if you have the money, buying from an SI is the next best (they basically do the same as a custom build, it's just that they're doing it instead of you), after that, you can get a gaming focused, used, prebuilt if you like (like an Alienware or something similarly gaming focused) and do some upgrades (GPU, disk, more RAM, etc) as appropriate, or buy a prebuilt office PC and add a good GPU.
  
  The custom built after market is a nightmare of both good and bad deals; for someone who isn't completely versed on hardware, I would say you either need to bring a friend who is, or just avoid it entirely.
  
  With all used/refurbished systems, always set aside some money for a new primary drive or SSD, since the one that's included is probably fairly worn out, and it's not unusual to have it fail within a few years of getting the system.
  
  The only new PC's I would say you should consider, are from SI's. Where it's basically a custom/self built PC, but built by someone else. Only if you have the money and only if you can't do it yourself for any reason. If you have any technical know how at all and can take an hour to look up PC building guides, then spend a few hours on pcpartpicker or similar to spec the system.... Then just do it yourself. I won't fault anyone for using an SI, if they simply don't have the time to learn and do it themselves, or if they have a mobility issue... (among many other reasons). Buying a new prebuilt from a big name should probably be avoided where possible (names like Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft, HP, Asus, Acer, etc). Used are fine as long as you can get a deal and the system is part of the business line.... For gaming, not a lot of business PCs are good for gaming. Some can be upgraded to be decent at it (usually by adding a consumer graphics card).
  
  The difficult one is laptops. If you want a mobile system with graphics enough to play modern games at even modest settings, you're going to have a lot of difficulty finding something in the used/refurb segments... Mainly because GPUs have such a significant performance difference between each generation. Any modern generation GPU in a laptop will command a very high price, and it goes downhill fast, especially considering that mobile GPUs are fairly poor for performance, even compared to the same generation of the same series of desktop card.
  
  In those cases, I'd generally recommend a business system with a thunderbolt GPU dock, and just slap in a desktop GPU. It's not as mobile, but you're going to save a lot of time and heartache trying to find a good system that fits both your performance requirements and your wallet. An external GPU dock gives you the flexibility of using less expensive desktop cards with more power, and upgrading that card whenever it suits you.

My 5 year old laptop just got blown up by fire in battery the other day. Would've been glad to use that sunnavaremoved a little more.

You're missing the Jolly Roger

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

I'm thinking of buying a Thinkpad w530 for such "geriatric" tasks

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.

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.

You got yourself a Batocera station there, mister.