• LanternEverywhere@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Davel23@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Bilb!@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

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

    • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • omnomed@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • swag_money@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

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

    • itsJoelle@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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?

    • SeekPie@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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…

  • Jumi@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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?).

  • radiosimian@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s often too late to realize it’s non repairable. When reviews first come out, no one reviews the drm on components. Even those teardown sites only cover how hard it is to open up a device but don’t cover if a part is drm’d until moths or years later. Because there is no way to know until 3rd party parts come out and they don’t work.

      • mugthol
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        1 year ago

        Yea, but what if you already have a laptop from such a manufacturer?

        • iopq@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          You will eventually have to replace it when there are no replacement batteries. Get one that’s focused on repairability. Then you can basically keep it forever

          • mugthol
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            1 year ago

            Yes that’s a good tip, but the OP comment was focused on people who already have a laptop

    • 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.

  • Gruntyfish@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

  • Matriks404@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Druid@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      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

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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…

      • voxel@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        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)

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Druid@lemmy.zip
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          1 year ago

          Might have to try that. I tried to open it up when I was thinking about getting an SSD for the laptop abd wanted to open it up to see if it has the needed slot, but I didn’t figure out how to.