An 8088, or anything manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation, might classify as a "very old machine" but something that's barely a decade old certainly doesn't.
One of my current desktops is an Ivy Bridge i7. It isn't that fast anymore, but with 32GB of RAM, it isn't too bad. I could really use some more cores for parallel builds though. Might be time to upgrade.
My current desktop is an i7-970: first generation i7, but hexa-core. It was the first time I bought a higher-end cpu and I've never regretted that. I also got it with 24GB RAM. Since then I upgraded both the graphics card and the disk (from WD Raptor to SSD). It's still very usable: it's for personal use and fast enough for browsing, development, and some (older) games.
Indeed, my daily driver (2nd gen Nehalem) is older, and it's more than fast enough except for the rare times I have to step foot into the world of JS and the bloated web.
I probably would draw line of old to somewhere Pentium 4. Very old maybe Pentium or 2. Anything Core and beyond is not that old. Slow for current waste of resources, but not really old.
I use (as a daily driver) an even older machine, a Dell D620. Well, I have two of them, D620 and D630, one runs Debian and one runs Gentoo. Friends are not amused by the fact that I can't play newer videogames.
That's why you'll see me commenting here that linked websites are bloat and take 10 seconds to load (: (OP'd website and HN are great though)
Both websites are working without hiccups. But I noticed that the website linked in [2] (free of javascript) sends a JSON response directly to the browser as a result of invalid email submitted, which may be puzzling to less tech-savvy users. Maybe this is even done for every error?
I inputted this-is-an-example-email@example as the E-Mail address, and as the response to the form submission, received a plain JSON document, which may not be desired. http://1507103400/dir/fastcomments.txt <= request example
But regarding performance I'd say it's perfectly usable. `neofetch --stdout` output of the machine on which I tested is also in the linked file. I used the palemoon browser.
I didn't test out Links browser, there's a chance it might work.
Thanks for the offer, but I live in Slovenia (:
You can try listing it on some flea-market websites, perhaps you may get some money, though it's a question if it's really worth it, but maybe I'd be of good use to someone.
I acquired a D620 at the start of the year to use as a semi-regular hobby machine. I love how user-servicable it is. Pretty easy to take apart and fairly modular design. I swapped out the processor for its maximum spec (a Core 2 Duo T7600) and 4GB of RAM.
I use Badwolf as the primary browser, which comes with built in toggles for disabling images and JS loading, and that makes web browsing tolerable most of the time. I've even managed to stream from it to Twitch using ffmpeg without much of a problem!
Nice! For browsing I usually use palemoon, a maintained fork of an old firefox version, which supports uBlock Origin.
Gentoo packages the links web browser, which is very minimal (own rendering system) and not useful for modern browsing, but useful for reading articles (also HN works).
There used to be a package repository for Debian for ungoogled-chromium, but that recently stopped being updated, so I uninstalled it. I never managed to build it on Gentoo, it took multiple days and I never had the patience.
Badwolf looks interesting but unfortunately doesn't have any ad-blocking programs.
I bought a Thinkpad T40 for new back in 2003 and used it for just shy of 10 years. It's single core processor meant that the web by 2013 was unusuable, but I could get by on the 1024x768 screen and upgrade the memory. It forced me to use script blockers, but for everything else that I used it for (data analysis, text editing) it was fine. I broke it by accident just before its 10th birthday and ended up replacing it with an X60 which was not much faster. But docks were cheap for it, and I was still able to do my research and get a successful 1/4M grant. Which got me a new computer.
I fondly think of those two machines which achieved far more than they had any right to. And honestly I sometimes think if the internet and some other bits of software weren't such a mess they'd probably still be fine for most day-to-day things.
I've always said computers have been so powerful for ages that it doesn't matter what the average home user buys anymore.
I just upgraded from my trusty 2011-built i5-2500K, not for any performance reason, but because the motherboard was getting flaky with random poweroff events and difficulty powering on again. My new i5-12400F doesn't really feel much faster. (I'd upgraded the old system along the way with better GPU and SSD)
My daily driver home machine is an i5-760 (Released in 2010!) with a GTX 1060, and it works GREAT. I play lots of RTS-like games in 4K via Steam (Stellaris, Civ, Timberborn, Factorio, Valheim, etc) and there's absolutely no problem whatsoever. The "pcmasterrace" mentality that makes you think nothing works without the latest & greatest CPUs & Graphics is just blatantly false.
I've always run Ubuntu on it as my daily driver, and I think that's part of my success. Windows machines of this age are seem to be more susceptible to long-term performance degradation.
As a comparison, I routinely use it side-by-side with much more recent machines (Intel 10th gens) provided by my workplace, and all the machines feel nearly identical in speed and performance to my 12-year old beater.
My only regret/hope is that my ancient motherboard doesn't seem to support more than 8G RAM, which is a bit annoying given how cheap memory is at this point.
I think linux is an important part of using old machines. I use a 2014 11" Macbook Air, (not too old, but quite a weak processor for 2014), and macOS and Windows run like treacle. Stock Ubuntu with Gnome is snappy though, I don't even need one of the lightweight variants.
One of my main concerns using an older machine is screen quality. I used my 2013 MacBook Pro until it died last year and that was plenty fast, but it also had a very good screen.
When looking at older Dell og Lenovo laptops, the thing that keeps me from buying is the screen. I suppose I could just use it with an external monitor.
I still use a HP ZBook G2 from 2015, but the PWM flicker [1] is crazy. I'm not normally sensitive to PWM flicker, so I'm not sure what's going on with this particular screen.
I could replace the screen, but if it's a structural fault, that just puts me out €100 without anything to show for it. Also, it's got another problem where the sound breaks whenever I (un)dock the laptop.
I've reinstalled Windows and all the drivers, but that's solved neither problem. Perhaps it's time to move on. Can anyone else relate to this weird sense of defeat?
Depending on what you do and what you really need, old systems might well enough be sufficient. If your work is done on remote systems, you need very little. And if the "very old" thing has a SSD, enough RAM and a GPU that's supported enough to play full HD video, even more daily tasks that aren't high performance computing (3D modeling, gaming, ML, compiling Rust) are on table, too.
Where old systems fail often aren't directly tied to raw power. Better trackpads. Battery usage (both due to old batteries and better power management). The ability to drive modern displays so that your Times New Roman has smoother outlines.
Laptop screens, on average (high-end older systems might have better ones than "prosumer" ones from the 2020s).
For many use cases there's really very little need for the latest and greatest.
Understandable if you're a gamer, working in VR or heavy graphics, perhaps something with a decent GPU and a not-too-old CPU will be helpful.
Most of my work is web dev, plenty of webpack, browser tabs, PHPStorm & IDEA Ultimate doing their thing on a T-class 4th generation Intel CPU. It could be faster, sure, but I'm more often waiting for my brain than the machine. SSD & plenty of RAM helps a ton more than a fast CPU for this use case.
I do find it useful to dogfood on older devices: if what I'm working on is slow for me, it may well be slow for a reasonable proportion of its users, too.
Nice. Keeping that old hardware is quite the statement against the “every <x> years” cycle businesses need us to be in to stay profitable.
I feel bad, that having bought my first new computer since 2003, I am no longer a part of the the ancient machine club. But, it’s nice to see others keeping the old machines alive.
2003 would have meant a 32-bit single-core CPU with perhaps SSE2. I imagine you'd have encountered quite a lot of software that simply wouldn't run by now. I can't blame you for buying a new one.
I used a 2003 (or so) desktop computer as my only personal one until 2014, and I'm not really one to upgrade often or for no reason, but it has started becoming seriously limiting by then. That was partially because of the growing performance demands of the web and, in particular, because (proprietary) software started requiring features that the CPU simply didn't have. It was probably one of the last AMD CPUs without SSE2 support, though, and that was the first hard limit I ran into. Nowadays 32-bitness alone would probably limit even general desktop software you can run.
I have a hard time imagining what it would have been like to use a similar machine all the way until recent years.
I had to supplement my machine with cloud hosting and mainly work from the command line.
I also need to say that my “actually pays the bills” work was done on company computers, which were modern but not purchased by me.
I play games on a video game console, so that was never an issue. I’m primarily a C++ programmer, so making software always worked well on a Pentium 4 and is developed in the terminal. GNU/Linux, of course, still runs great on this old system. The biggest issue had been that web browsing had become a chore. The bloat of the web is well established, and loading huge websites was out of the question. Ad-blocking has become more difficult but was absolutely necessary, not loading JavaScript makes many pages unreadable, and so on… I got to the point where the fun of extending the life of my old laptop needed to be balanced against my lack of free time. I also really started to consider that a raspberry pi would be more powerful and consume less power, that my machine was not a collector item, and that the “greenest” thing may be upgrading.
Honestly, though my new machine is faster, I’m still not convinced that it provides me and added benefits or capability other than websites now working as intended. I think I was expecting more.
I still have my 2009 13 inch mac book pro. I've long since swapped out the hdd for an SSD and maxed the ram to 16GB but it's perfectly usable for light tasks and as a backup machine , has a lovely keyboard too. The battery it toast though!
My wife has said several times that I should replace it but I can't justify getting rid of a dependable machine.
I think you should go back and rename this "using a pretty modern machine".
CD drive, yup all of my computers have them.
i-series Intel chip, nope, none of my boxes have them. I am still on Core-duo/quad technology.
I don't really consider my computer _very_ old, and it runs all of my stuff. Granted, I am a sysadmin and do not do a lot of GIMP/ffmpeg... I am in the "cobbler has no shoes" camp, and not really by choice, but to say an i3 is really old or that you use a "very old" machine seems a bit of a stretch. It was not too long ago those came out.
The core i series has been around over a decade now, but the last decade has brought relatively little advancement in terms of personal computing.
As of a few months ago I've finally switched to a main computer that isn't a Core2 Duo or a PowerPC G4, both of which have been (and still are) mainstays of my personal computing journey for about a decade (once I finally left behind Pentium 4s). Heck, it was only a few years ago I was doing Dual Core Pentium to Core2 Quad CPU upgrades on our production fleet at work. Does time really move that fast?
Damn, you have two cores! I'm stuck with just one on my merely a decade (and a half?) old netbook. A bit ashamed to admit, but I didn't know better at the time I bought it, and boy does this purchase feel like a scam now :)
I've casually tried out probably all the popular performance-oriented Linux distros. Some of them aren't really what they claim to be (Zorin OS Lite, for instance), while some perform fairly well (Debian + LXQT). Windows is surprisingly good in the GUI performance department, too! But all is well only until you open a browser or start updating the system. Then it doesn't matter which OS you are running since it won't really be 'running' anymore. One core simply isn't enough for the modern systems to run well, apparently.
Kinda makes me sad that I have to fiddle with the distros and be looking for alternatives for essential software like web-browser as I recall Windows XP running simply great on the thing. I'd really like to know what that is we get these days on the modern systems that hogs the CPU like it does.
PS: for those in the same boat, Midori [0] performs considerably better than mainstream browsers while having fairly tidy looks and a few useful features like an ad blocking mechanism and ability to disable scripts and images.
I also fell for the hype - was a big supporter of the OLPC then Asus released their first netbooks EEE range - bought one and it was shit - blamed the mediocre Intel Atom processor and the keyboard was kind of dinky for my paws.
Web browsers running heavy applications ("web sites" we used to call them) will simply be slow because of them. Ad-blockers are a must since plenty of ads are javascript-heavy, and you can surely switch to NoScript-approach to disable all JS. Of course, not more than a few tabs running in the background.
Pre-emptive multitasking should allow your system to run multiple programs just fine, provided you've got a sufficiently fast core in the first place.
My Sony Vaio Z790 from 2009 with Intel Core Duo P9700 runs just fine (though that has an SSD as well): it's dual core score is identical to it's single core score on cpubenchmark.net at around ~1100, while the fastest Atom never reached more than 1000 single-core score until Q2 2021 (with x6211E), and there are still only 5 of Atom CPUs that beat that, and another 4 topping 800 ever. So your netbook likely has a super slow single core with low cache too.
At the time of the netbook craze, I've invested in one of the fancy metal HP "business" netbooks on the expensive side (~$500): lovely 10-11" machine, but slow as hell. I quickly sold it away after basically not using it at all.
Edit: I just looked it up, and it was HP Mini 2140 with a feisty N270 Atom CPU scoring an entirety of ~170 on cpubenchmark in both single- and multi-core benchmarks.
I never bought a computer new the last few years except for kids laptops for college for the sake of the warranty - got a used 32GB i7-6700 game PC with a RX580 GPU when we switched to WFH during Covid.
My home server/NAS is a refurb Dell.
Now freelancing so my current laptop is my daughters old Thinkpad E-450 (also bought as a refurb) - one CTRL keytop is missing and it has a corner crack , just added more memory and a SSD.
Got a Xeon E3-1220 board and CPU for free as backup just in case the i7 dies.
I thought this would be something from 200X but i guess 11 years is a lot...
my current daily driver is a i3-370M which is pretty close in performance (although i have a radeon hd 5470 so atleast i can play modded terraria with semi stutters)
The 3GB of ram is quite limiting but zram at least lets me use it fully without unbearable lag (it's quite fun when the computer is working full tilt; 100% cpu, technically more than available ram being used (i saw like 6-7G used with imagemagick) and my music playing in the background occasionally stuttering :P)
I'm actually using an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 machine and I don't consider it an old machine. A Pentium 4 would totally be a pretty old machine, for example.
Anyway, I find this as a good practice. First, to continue using perfectly working machines, and second, to develop in machines that aren't that powerful to be more conscious about resources used by the software you make.
The only re-purposing I could do with my otherwise perfect phone was to consign it to the great pile of old phones I have after the app stopped working to unlock my car.
Up until about a month ago when I bought a Mac Studio, my main machine was a 12 year old iMac. It was maxed out when I bought it, and it's still fairly usable. The downside is it's stuck on High Sierra and won't run Windows 10.
I buy my computers basically maxed out, and use them literally forever.
Yep had a dual Xeon CPU cheesegrater Mac Pro - best machine I ever owned but then Apple deprecated macOS support for it and then sold for a the same price I paid 2 years before.
Could not afford a new Mac so I switched back to Windows.
I’m using 10 years MacBook (not retina) as home computer - it has 16gb memory and 2tb ssd. And works quite good for web browsing, writing documents, even for some development (like patching Spark Redis connector, although it’s usually augmented by separate Linux desktop). Maybe I’ll upgrade at some point, but it’s still good for many tasks. The only problem is Mac OS version :-(
I am using a Thinkpad X220 as a main driver. Actually, this is my second one: an i7. I broke the motherboard of the first one (an i5) a few years ago and bought a replacement laptop. But during the pandemic I repaired the first one, so now I have a backup. Not bad for an 11-year-old machine.
Still rocking Dell Precision M4400 from 2009 with Intel Core 2 Duo and NVIDIA Quadro FX 770M. Arch + XFCE + Nvidia drivers from the AUR (not in main repos anymore). On my 5th battery pack and 3rd wifi module. Runs like a champ. Replaced CD drive with second SSD (replaced original HDD to SSD long ago). This laptop was powered on pretty much non-stop for 13 years! Dat thermal paste gotta be cooked solid by now. They just don't make 'em this good anymore...
I'm also a fan of Dell Precision: typing this on a M4700 (with a 3rth generation i7). Running Debian stable with KDE Plasma on it. It was my work laptop for 4 years and then became my personal laptop. Still in very good condition. And I actually love the keyboard more than the (more chiclet-like) keyboard on the more recent Precisions.
I repasted, repadded, and thoroughly cleaned mine a couple of months ago. I did that because the cpu got pretty hot, even with low load. After the cleaning cpu temperature was about 10 degress lower. And it's not hard to do, because these machines are easy to take apart. I also replaced the battery recently (now 3rth one I think). And I should actually replace the CMOS battery, because it's completely dead. It's really nice laptop, the only drawback is the weight.
I really like the Dell Precisions and I think the more recent ones are also well-built. They are professional laptops and not cheap, but worth it in my opinion.
2014 i7 5930k Desktop with 32gb of ram and Vega 56 running at 4GHz. I think it will last me another five years easy as single thread performance has not increased that massively since 2014.
I feel a bit bad about giving such negative feedback, but I have to chime in with the crowd: Sandy Bridge is out-dated, but it's not "very old".
A dual socket 2687W system (16C/32T, 3.1GHz base, 3.8GHz turbo, octa channel DDR3) can still keep up with a Ryzen 5600X for suitable workloads. And fits into 1U.
Much harder to emulate with a cluster of 486 or C64 (and then 2x2687 total power draw of >500W under full load would seem like a rounding error).
It could definitely be faster, but it’s fast enough for almost everything. Rust builds are on the slow side, and this is what I do most on this machine… but to be honest, I just ran some comparisons against the 2019 machine I have at work and they don’t /feel/ that different. I don’t see a great reason to spend several $k on a maxed out machine from 2022 and replace it…
And I kinda like the feeling of holding onto this “old” cool machine.
I used my 14 year old laptop for a while. It worked fine. The electron apps surely took my 6gigs ram for a rough ride. And sometimes it got hanged. But everything was functional. I also think everyone should use an old computer to develop software. ElectronJS wouldn't have happened if we did.
BTW, it SHOULD be considered old. Maybe not retro level. But old. The author means old as a functional computer which can be used in day to day work or even professional.
64 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadHe also reacquired my first computer, which was an obscure 8080A machine ("Interact") with a tape drive.
That's why you'll see me commenting here that linked websites are bloat and take 10 seconds to load (: (OP'd website and HN are great though)
I'm curious, how quickly does our product load for you? [1]
The SSR version should be much faster [2].
[1] https://fastcomments.com/demo
[2] https://fastcomments.com/ssr/comments?tenantId=nYrnfYEv&urlI...
I inputted this-is-an-example-email@example as the E-Mail address, and as the response to the form submission, received a plain JSON document, which may not be desired. http://1507103400/dir/fastcomments.txt <= request example
But regarding performance I'd say it's perfectly usable. `neofetch --stdout` output of the machine on which I tested is also in the linked file. I used the palemoon browser.
I didn't test out Links browser, there's a chance it might work.
We execute the frontend code server side and there are some edge cases here and there :)
I use Badwolf as the primary browser, which comes with built in toggles for disabling images and JS loading, and that makes web browsing tolerable most of the time. I've even managed to stream from it to Twitch using ffmpeg without much of a problem!
Gentoo packages the links web browser, which is very minimal (own rendering system) and not useful for modern browsing, but useful for reading articles (also HN works).
There used to be a package repository for Debian for ungoogled-chromium, but that recently stopped being updated, so I uninstalled it. I never managed to build it on Gentoo, it took multiple days and I never had the patience.
Badwolf looks interesting but unfortunately doesn't have any ad-blocking programs.
I fondly think of those two machines which achieved far more than they had any right to. And honestly I sometimes think if the internet and some other bits of software weren't such a mess they'd probably still be fine for most day-to-day things.
I just upgraded from my trusty 2011-built i5-2500K, not for any performance reason, but because the motherboard was getting flaky with random poweroff events and difficulty powering on again. My new i5-12400F doesn't really feel much faster. (I'd upgraded the old system along the way with better GPU and SSD)
My daily driver home machine is an i5-760 (Released in 2010!) with a GTX 1060, and it works GREAT. I play lots of RTS-like games in 4K via Steam (Stellaris, Civ, Timberborn, Factorio, Valheim, etc) and there's absolutely no problem whatsoever. The "pcmasterrace" mentality that makes you think nothing works without the latest & greatest CPUs & Graphics is just blatantly false.
I've always run Ubuntu on it as my daily driver, and I think that's part of my success. Windows machines of this age are seem to be more susceptible to long-term performance degradation.
As a comparison, I routinely use it side-by-side with much more recent machines (Intel 10th gens) provided by my workplace, and all the machines feel nearly identical in speed and performance to my 12-year old beater.
My only regret/hope is that my ancient motherboard doesn't seem to support more than 8G RAM, which is a bit annoying given how cheap memory is at this point.
I think linux is an important part of using old machines. I use a 2014 11" Macbook Air, (not too old, but quite a weak processor for 2014), and macOS and Windows run like treacle. Stock Ubuntu with Gnome is snappy though, I don't even need one of the lightweight variants.
When looking at older Dell og Lenovo laptops, the thing that keeps me from buying is the screen. I suppose I could just use it with an external monitor.
I could replace the screen, but if it's a structural fault, that just puts me out €100 without anything to show for it. Also, it's got another problem where the sound breaks whenever I (un)dock the laptop.
I've reinstalled Windows and all the drivers, but that's solved neither problem. Perhaps it's time to move on. Can anyone else relate to this weird sense of defeat?
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Why-Pulse-Width-Modulation-PWM...
Where old systems fail often aren't directly tied to raw power. Better trackpads. Battery usage (both due to old batteries and better power management). The ability to drive modern displays so that your Times New Roman has smoother outlines.
Laptop screens, on average (high-end older systems might have better ones than "prosumer" ones from the 2020s).
Understandable if you're a gamer, working in VR or heavy graphics, perhaps something with a decent GPU and a not-too-old CPU will be helpful.
Most of my work is web dev, plenty of webpack, browser tabs, PHPStorm & IDEA Ultimate doing their thing on a T-class 4th generation Intel CPU. It could be faster, sure, but I'm more often waiting for my brain than the machine. SSD & plenty of RAM helps a ton more than a fast CPU for this use case.
I do find it useful to dogfood on older devices: if what I'm working on is slow for me, it may well be slow for a reasonable proportion of its users, too.
I used a 2003 (or so) desktop computer as my only personal one until 2014, and I'm not really one to upgrade often or for no reason, but it has started becoming seriously limiting by then. That was partially because of the growing performance demands of the web and, in particular, because (proprietary) software started requiring features that the CPU simply didn't have. It was probably one of the last AMD CPUs without SSE2 support, though, and that was the first hard limit I ran into. Nowadays 32-bitness alone would probably limit even general desktop software you can run.
I have a hard time imagining what it would have been like to use a similar machine all the way until recent years.
My wife has said several times that I should replace it but I can't justify getting rid of a dependable machine.
CD drive, yup all of my computers have them.
i-series Intel chip, nope, none of my boxes have them. I am still on Core-duo/quad technology.
I don't really consider my computer _very_ old, and it runs all of my stuff. Granted, I am a sysadmin and do not do a lot of GIMP/ffmpeg... I am in the "cobbler has no shoes" camp, and not really by choice, but to say an i3 is really old or that you use a "very old" machine seems a bit of a stretch. It was not too long ago those came out.
As of a few months ago I've finally switched to a main computer that isn't a Core2 Duo or a PowerPC G4, both of which have been (and still are) mainstays of my personal computing journey for about a decade (once I finally left behind Pentium 4s). Heck, it was only a few years ago I was doing Dual Core Pentium to Core2 Quad CPU upgrades on our production fleet at work. Does time really move that fast?
I've casually tried out probably all the popular performance-oriented Linux distros. Some of them aren't really what they claim to be (Zorin OS Lite, for instance), while some perform fairly well (Debian + LXQT). Windows is surprisingly good in the GUI performance department, too! But all is well only until you open a browser or start updating the system. Then it doesn't matter which OS you are running since it won't really be 'running' anymore. One core simply isn't enough for the modern systems to run well, apparently.
Kinda makes me sad that I have to fiddle with the distros and be looking for alternatives for essential software like web-browser as I recall Windows XP running simply great on the thing. I'd really like to know what that is we get these days on the modern systems that hogs the CPU like it does.
PS: for those in the same boat, Midori [0] performs considerably better than mainstream browsers while having fairly tidy looks and a few useful features like an ad blocking mechanism and ability to disable scripts and images.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(web_browser)
Pre-emptive multitasking should allow your system to run multiple programs just fine, provided you've got a sufficiently fast core in the first place.
My Sony Vaio Z790 from 2009 with Intel Core Duo P9700 runs just fine (though that has an SSD as well): it's dual core score is identical to it's single core score on cpubenchmark.net at around ~1100, while the fastest Atom never reached more than 1000 single-core score until Q2 2021 (with x6211E), and there are still only 5 of Atom CPUs that beat that, and another 4 topping 800 ever. So your netbook likely has a super slow single core with low cache too.
At the time of the netbook craze, I've invested in one of the fancy metal HP "business" netbooks on the expensive side (~$500): lovely 10-11" machine, but slow as hell. I quickly sold it away after basically not using it at all.
Edit: I just looked it up, and it was HP Mini 2140 with a feisty N270 Atom CPU scoring an entirety of ~170 on cpubenchmark in both single- and multi-core benchmarks.
My home server/NAS is a refurb Dell.
Now freelancing so my current laptop is my daughters old Thinkpad E-450 (also bought as a refurb) - one CTRL keytop is missing and it has a corner crack , just added more memory and a SSD.
Got a Xeon E3-1220 board and CPU for free as backup just in case the i7 dies.
my current daily driver is a i3-370M which is pretty close in performance (although i have a radeon hd 5470 so atleast i can play modded terraria with semi stutters) The 3GB of ram is quite limiting but zram at least lets me use it fully without unbearable lag (it's quite fun when the computer is working full tilt; 100% cpu, technically more than available ram being used (i saw like 6-7G used with imagemagick) and my music playing in the background occasionally stuttering :P)
Anyway, I find this as a good practice. First, to continue using perfectly working machines, and second, to develop in machines that aren't that powerful to be more conscious about resources used by the software you make.
The only re-purposing I could do with my otherwise perfect phone was to consign it to the great pile of old phones I have after the app stopped working to unlock my car.
Wait... what? You had to use an app to unlock your car!?
What manufacturer was this? Did it come that way from the factory?
I buy my computers basically maxed out, and use them literally forever.
Could not afford a new Mac so I switched back to Windows.
Of course, when I first saw that, I thought it was a Commodore that I’d never heard of before.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Precision-M4400-No...
I repasted, repadded, and thoroughly cleaned mine a couple of months ago. I did that because the cpu got pretty hot, even with low load. After the cleaning cpu temperature was about 10 degress lower. And it's not hard to do, because these machines are easy to take apart. I also replaced the battery recently (now 3rth one I think). And I should actually replace the CMOS battery, because it's completely dead. It's really nice laptop, the only drawback is the weight.
I really like the Dell Precisions and I think the more recent ones are also well-built. They are professional laptops and not cheap, but worth it in my opinion.
Upgraded storage as my original m2 ssd wore out.
A dual socket 2687W system (16C/32T, 3.1GHz base, 3.8GHz turbo, octa channel DDR3) can still keep up with a Ryzen 5600X for suitable workloads. And fits into 1U.
Much harder to emulate with a cluster of 486 or C64 (and then 2x2687 total power draw of >500W under full load would seem like a rounding error).
It could definitely be faster, but it’s fast enough for almost everything. Rust builds are on the slow side, and this is what I do most on this machine… but to be honest, I just ran some comparisons against the 2019 machine I have at work and they don’t /feel/ that different. I don’t see a great reason to spend several $k on a maxed out machine from 2022 and replace it…
And I kinda like the feeling of holding onto this “old” cool machine.
BTW, it SHOULD be considered old. Maybe not retro level. But old. The author means old as a functional computer which can be used in day to day work or even professional.