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 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.
Agreed!
Only netbook kids will get this.
Best times in portable computing
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’m tired, boss.
Shut up! I bought you to obey, not to mouth off.
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.
T60 gang
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.
Verbally slaying the sinner is a form of kindness. Letting people break user space willy-nilly is not kind
There’s something oddly wholesome about this comic.
Man I feel that in my bones.
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!
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.
You really just need, like, a screwdriver set to get into most laptops. Maybe you can search online (e.g. on YouTube) for tutorials for your model. Then you can buy a replacement fan and also replace the thermal paste, because 13-year-old thermal paste surely isn’t doing you any favors in the performance department. Altogether it shouldn’t cost more than €50 (if you’re careful not to break any internals).
BTW, if you want to watch YouTube videos with less resources, you can also copy the video URL into VLC
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.
Its a lot better than a couple years back afaik. But as the sysadmin always preaches: dont fix if not broken! If you‘re okay with maybe having to reinstall w10 then you could try. Lubuntu was my savior btw.
Ya it’s not a huge concern as it runs rock solid for months at a time without even needing a reboot, but I would like to eventually toss windows in the virtual recyle bin at some point.
I have a few old hard drives kicking around, so I may swap one out one of these days and give it a shot just to try it and see how it goes.
Thats the most sane answer! I didnt even think of this. Give lubuntu a try. Its super light weights and lxqt even revived my presumed dead granddad laptop.
cloud pc for gaming
can you say more about that pls?
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.
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.Is it a Thinkpad?
Nope, MacBook Pro
“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!”
oddly wholesome
You feel bad for zis little laptop.
This is because you crazy. It has no feelings. It is just a machine.
Wholesome-ness on the internet? In this economy?!
My 5 year old laptop just got blown up by fire in battery the other day. Would’ve been glad to use that sunnavabitch a little more.
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.
