My 9 year old laptop is currently sitting in two pieces… But only because I wanted to pull the hard drive out for easier transferring of old files I wanted to keep.
When I get back to the main part, I’ll be removing 90% of the apps on it, doing everything I can to make it run better, and it will be my hobby shop computer. It was going back and forth between my game room and the garage where I kept my lasers and printers.
If and when it finally bites the dust, it will be given a place of honor amongst the modern tech. Like a transparent top coffee table with all the parts disassembled and arranged inside.
I’m weirdly nostalgic about my electronics.
My Laptop will be 15 years old this year.
It was running Vista when I bought it, then upgraded to Win 7, and now runs whatever flavor of Linux I feel like installing.
Battery is shot. Screen connection is iffy, but works if you wiggle it. Several keys stopped working after I accidentally threw up on it, but I can use an onscreen keyboard for those.
Still runs fine. She’s a trooper.
I’m not one to kink shame, but anyone who throws up on a laptop on purpose needs help.
I’m guessing alcohol. I had a friend throw up on a 20 year old laptop and that finally killed it.
You guessed correctly.
I was pulling an all-nighter reading fan fiction serials while drinking Kraken mixed with Orange Juice and had also eaten a whole frozen pizza around midnight. I was not ok. The incident happened around 3am.
First time I’d ever vomited while drunk. I know my limits better now.
my 13 years old laptop works good as server. Sometimes he fell asleep when I watch a movie with Jellyfin but it’s okey.
At least for me, both my laptop (daily driver) and desktop would be considered old by this comic (2014 and 2017 respectively). Neither of them are struggling with the tasks I mostly use them for (writing notes, programming, light gaming on my desktop).
The only things they are struggling at, are modern video codecs and the ABSOLUTELY BLOATED shitshow that is today’s Internet experience.
My 2012 desktop PC died the other day.
I took out all her parts and determined that the fault was with the power supply and with a wonky pci shield on the wifi card. Replaced the psu and straighten the shield with pliers, reapply thermal compound for fun, and bam, shes back.
Its an i73770k lga1155 socket, with 16g DDR3 RAM. They dont make lga1155 sockets anymore, or DDR3 ram, so I would have been out $1600 to replace the CPU, motherboard, and RAM.
But now, she might have another 5 years in her yet. Im determined to keep her around until she’s old enough to vote at least.
I’m pretty sure you could get a full brand new desktop that is more powerful for much less than $1600…
Probably, but I wouldn’t settle for something that’s just more powerful, Id want to spend the money to get higher-end current-gen hardware that will last me another 15 years, including upgrading to a good M.2 drive and better GPU. In AUD Id probably be spending at least $2k.
In fact I still have the birth certificate for my current PC, and I spent $1500 on it in 2012 dollars.
Next month is my desktops CPU model’s 10th birthmonth. Still my default computer.
Absolutely, a ten year old computer today is still capable of doing pretty much everything that most people use computers for. It’s not like the old days when every few years a new tier of computer would come out that made older devices no longer capable of doing what people wanted.
“By the time you see it on the shelf, it’s already obsolete“
I ‘member
It’s all about the pentiums, baby!
Throw the snacks in the bag!
You feel sorry for ze little old computer. Zis is because you crazy. It is just a machine; it has no feelings.
It is working just as well as it was 10 years ago and capable of all the same things now as it was back then. Nothing has changed except your expectations of it. That’s right, there’s nothing wrong with it – in reality, you’re the problem.
You monster.
Not really. As it’s been updated over the years with new features the OS has heavier usage on the hardware. Also if it’s still got a hard drive in there chances are it’s dying after 10 years
Running an OS significantly newer than original on a computer gets filed under “expectations.” Nobody bitches their Amiga can’t run Windows 98, either. If it is 10 years old, its original OS was Windows 8, updates for which ended in 2016 (or last year, for Windows 8.1). No new bloat after that!
But even so, unless the computer in question is a netbook or something it’ll be fine. For reference, I have a ThinkPad laptop that was manufactured in 2012 and I still use it daily. It runs Windows 10 just fine. Updates and all. The latest Corel suite, modern browsers, video editing, no problem. PC performance reached a bit of plateau coincidentally… about 10 years ago.
The MTBF of even a middling consumer hard drive is, if we are being extremely uncharitable, 300,000 hours. That’s 32 and a quarter years of continuous usage and there are vintage hard drives in circulation in perfect working order that are much, much older than that. The main thing this laptop is going to need help with is its battery, which probably is degraded a bit by now.
At least he looks like he’s enjoying making music =)
Far more than comfort, we old men want most to be useful.
I have a 14 year old laptop that runs like a top with debian 12 on it.
How about installing Gentoo on it?
Not sure the 0.01s of reduced login time is worth the 30 hours it’ll take to build the kernel.
Windows Laptop: “Sure, no problem, just let me install all these updates first. Why don’t you go ahead and create a Microsoft account?”
This is one benefit of still using Windows 7
I remember one of my first machines, a 486DX50 I think, really had a hard time playing mp3 files. But it hasn’t been an issue for anything that came later.
I remember when I had a P60 and mp3 players could barely keep up
Then winamp came along and whipped the llama’s ass
With an SSD and enough RAM, I think old machines are more than capable for most basic task
Hell, I was gaming on a PC from 2013 all the way into 2022 (i5-4670K, 16GB DDR3 1600, and a 770, later upgraded to a 1070). My CPU stopped meeting the minimum requirement for games around 2018-2019, but it was enough to maintain 60 FPS @ 1080p in all but the most demanding titles. If a pile a money didn’t fall in my lap, I’d still be gaming on it today. But now that I’ve experienced 4K 120Hz gaming in HDR with Ray Tracing and DLSS, I could never go back. It was worth building a new PC for HDR and DLSS alone.