OT - How old is your everyday computer?

[BigEd]

Just noticed that my use-it-all-the-time-every-day laptop is from "mid-2013" which makes it more or less 10 years old. (My other laptop dates from 2015.)

Any advance on using a 10 year old machine for all your email, browser and video conferencing needs?

[cmorley]

My laptop is March 2018 vintage... 4K screen and decent i7 processor it is still good enough.

My desktop is an i7 920... yep OG i7 overclocked to 3.8GHz. 2008 IIRC?

I don't see anything I need from a newer machine...

[KenLowe]

Yeah, I jumped off the 'need to upgrade my computer every couple of years' train many years ago now. I'm probably not going to win this competition, but my go to laptop must be about 12 years old. I have had to upgrade the HDD on it a couple of times (now running an SSD). I've also had to swap out the graphics card and the Wireless adaptor in the past (yes, these are stand alone parts!):

viewtopic.php?p=253561#p253561

It's still going strong, although it's a bit battered and bruised now. It was pretty high spec when I got it.

[NickLuvsRetro]

My laptop is a 2014 MBP that has done me so well I've never really thought about replacing it. I might put the OpenCore Legacy Patcher on it to allow me to upgrade it to Ventura.

My desktop was specced up in 2019, I think? It's an AMD Ryzen5 with Nvididia GTX1660 Ti... still runs Elite Dangerous, recent Total War, the new SystemShock remake... so I'm not seeing the benefits of RTX for my non-4k low-dpi monitor just yet.

I am thinking about a new build with RTX 4080, but I don't know if I can be bothered shifting all my drives and data over...

[geraldholdsworth]

My laptop is a 2012 MBP, while my desktop is a 2014 Mac Mini. I've also considered using the patch to get to Ventura...but I'm also considering buying a brand new laptop.

[BeebMaster]

My current desktop PC dates from November 2020 and has AMD Ryzen 5 CPU and 32GB RAM and is currently running Ubuntu 22.04. My previous desktop was from 2003 and was retired a couple of years earlier. That was the first desktop PC I ever owned, before that I had two laptops - one from "Morgan Mail Order" in 1995 which replaced my Master 128 as my main computer just as I was going to university, but didn't last very long, and then my 1996 Olivetti laptop which cost me my entire 1996-1997 student loan, and was in use, including creating the beginnings of my website in spring 2003, till the 2003 desktop came along.

Between the two desktops, I was using a Raspberry Pi 4B as a desktop computer running Raspbian desktop for about a year (this is now my Pi Econet Bridge computer, still running the Raspbian desktop), and I also was using my laptop from 2017.

My current laptop dates from February 2023, replacing the 2017 laptop which gradually fell to bits such that the keyboard and mouse pad no longer worked. (The ribbon cables had deteriorated from various disassemblies to fit new hard drive and memory upgrade etc.) The keyboard finally gave up in September 2022 when I'd just arrived in London and gone online to find out the current status of The Queue, and I had to go to John Lewis [never knowingly oversold - R I Perrin] to buy a USB keyboard. In fact, they didn't have such a thing any more, and I had to buy a wireless keyboard with a USB transmitter. Long before that, the spring on the Ethernet socket broke so I had to superglue a short Ethernet cable in and use a joiner on the end of it. Even before that, after I'd only had it for about a year (think I posted on here about it at the time) the backlight on the display broke down so that it would only work on mains power. Prior to the 2017 laptop I bought a notebook type laptop in March 2011.

Everyone including me has interpreted "everyday computer" as "modern PC or equivalent" (though I know there's a caveat as to what it means in Big Ed's original post) but it's fair to say that I use some of my Acorns nearly as much as anything more modern, especially Econet Station 201 (Master 512 with MOS 3.50) which gets almost daily use.

[flaxcottage]

For admin, office stuff and exam work I use a Win 10 Dell Optiplex 790, cheapo 2nd hand machine. It also runs the two games I play - Starcraft original and MTGA.

Other than that, my day to day computer is a Master 128 + internal multi-copro + internal datacentre with x4 HDDs + Econet + Master SD cartridge. So relaxing to use BBC BASIC and 6502 assembler.

[guesser]

My main PC (an i7-3820) is just a bit past 10 years old, but other less "everyday" machines are much older.

The PC in my workshop is the one that this replaced and then went on to be my dad's machine until the main electrolytics dried out which I used as a good excuse to get him off XP but have since replaced. That's a core2duo from early 2006. It's slow enough to be frustrating firing up firefox, but part of that will be that it's still running off a mechanical drive (might even be IDE) as it's not quite frustrating enough to get around to putting an ssd in and cloning it but does what it needs to.

My laptop gets very little use these days because I can mostly get by on my phone the limited amount I'm away from home for any amount of time, but that's from late 2009 and still works tolerably for light browsing and as an ssh terminal.

PCs have been "finished" for ages in many ways as far as I'm concerned.

[Coeus]

My current machine, cobbled together with a mix of bits, is based on a ThinkStation M700 but has an i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 32Gb RAM and a 1TB SSD. The CPU at least dates from around 2015, probably the same for the case/motherboard etc. though the RAM and SSD are more modern.

I still have the previous machine which has a i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40Ghz so dates from around 2012. The upgrade was to improve reliability rather than to increase performance, though the new one is noticeably faster on such things as compiling or video processing.

Both are running Arch Linux.

[sweh]

My desktop is from 2011: HP Pavillion AMD Phenom II X4 830 (running Debian).

My not-a-server is from 2010: a home built Core i5-750 2.67Ghz based system (running CentOS 7).

I keep thinking about refreshing the not-a-server but then I look at the cost (approx US$1000) and I think "maybe not!"

[1024MAK]

Okay, so keep in mind that I have a number of “PCs”.

But one that gets used every day, or nearly every day, but only for some things (that does sometimes include email, occasionally using Firefox {although that’s now a bit slow}, LibreOffice) is a tower system with an AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3000+
I don’t know how old it is. And it no longer has the original HDD. I replaced the HDD in 2009…

The PSU fan occasionally rattles, so I may replace that. I have actually bought a new tower PC to replace this, but have not gotten around to installing applications or transferring files over yet!

Obviously it’s too old to run any modern Windows OS, hence is running a Linux OS.

For anything that has greater needs, I have a more modern Laptop (Running Windows 10).

Mark

[Ukwebb]

my daily driver is around 30 years old.
Yes, admittedly its had a few upgrades along the way, like more ram, new cpu, and motherboard to match, the odd new hard drive, even an occasional ssd, an a new case or two as they get rather 'old' looking....

think "Triggers broom" and you're not far off the mark !

[Lardo Boffin]

I have a 2010 iMac 27”. Not sure if it mid or late 2010 without firing it up.

And it is HEAVY!

I also have a 17” Macbook Pro from the same year but that is a little poorly at the mo.

[lovebug]

my laptop is an acer e1-570 from 2012, has a core i3-3210u with intel hd graphics on cpu and with the original mechanical hdd

[guesser]

think "Triggers broom" and you're not far off the mark !

Oh I was taking the motherboard and CPU as "the PC" in my reply, otherwise it just gets too complicated... Alternatively, after all the years of swapping parts about I think my PC might currently be in at least three rooms at once

[Ronin47]

My work laptop is coming up to 4 years old, and I have a 2012 Macbook Pro using bootcamp for my workbench machine. My other Windows laptop is from 2017.

These do get used daily, but my main daily driver is a 2021 14" Macbook Pro M1, which is coming up to 2 years old in October.

[flibble]

My main PC is 6 years old, I've normally tried to replace them not more often than 8 years or so.

My laptop is 11 years old now, but gets lighter use, and has had an RAM and SSD upgrade to make it slightly more performant.

Amusingly the laptop is eligible for a free Win 11 upgrade, despite being considerably slower, whereas the desktop isn't.

[markusher]

Given the replies on the thread so far, I am now too embarrassed to say!

[sydney]

My most used PC is an HP prodesk 600 g1 sff i5-4570 which was launched in 2013 but I didn't buy it until a couple of years ago. I tend to upgrade every 4 to 5 years and rarely spend more than £50 though I seem to remember this machine cost me £70. I've added 8gb of ram and an SSD. It's running Linux mint and will probably last me another 3 or 4 years as everything I use feels more than fast enough. Once things start to feel sluggish I'll reinstall the os and if things don't improve I'll look to buy something more capable.

[tricky]

I have a work laptop as only work machines can access work.
For myself, I have an 8 year old i7 and the others have 12 year old it's. We all run win 7 except the work laptop which is win 10.
The gfx cards are fan less and one just uses the i5. Apart from visual studio getting slower with each version everything else is the same software I was running 10 years ago.

Actually, my paint shop Pro v5.2 is probably from the 90s and my travel netbook is now 18 years old and still runs vs6 like a dream.

[tnash]

2022 Asus Vivobook. Lovely screen. Terrible battery life. Needs more RAM. Really enjoying Fedora on it after years of boring Windows.

[davidb]

2022 Asus Vivobook. Lovely screen. Terrible battery life. Needs more RAM. Really enjoying Fedora on it after years of boring Windows.

I picked up one of these for work. It was possible to upgrade the RAM from 8GB (not enough to run today's bloatware) to 16GB (it copes).

[BeebMaster]

Coo, makes me seem pretty up to date given some of these heartwarming replies, who'd have thought it! Think I would have done much better if the question had been "What do you write with?" or "How do you watch your favourite TV programme?" !

[algenon_iii]

The laptop I'm writing this on is a Mid-2010 MacBook, it's the one I use for web browsing etc.

Have a newer desktop but don't bother using it, not even sure when I last used it.

[baz4096]

Mac Book Pro from 2013 here. Used near daily, and yet the battery still has about 90% life in it. Best non-Acorn machine I've ever owned. Not looking forward to the inevitable day when it does die and needs replacing, as it cost me less than £1200 back in 2013. They're nowhere near that price range nowadays. Still, I guess it's cost me ~£12 a month for the last decade, which isn't bad going!

[egrath]

I tend to use computers which are at least 4 years old, because i buy them from the company i work for as soon as they get thrown out for being "too slow". Currently my main workstation is a 2017 HP Z440 and i'm more than satisfied with it. IMHO, replacing computers with newer ones has become a less pressing issue in the last years as everything from the last 10-12 years is powerful enough to run most software without any issues, except when you do some compute-intensive high-end work.

[DutchAcorn]

I mostly use a 2012 Dell Lattitude e6220 laptop. It's on it's 3rd battery, has had an upgrade from the original 4 to 12 gigs of RAM and had an SSD upgrade a few years ago. My main issues with this machine are the poor webcam (I use an external) and the unavailability of updated video drivers. It can't be upgraded to Win11, but Win10 is fine.

I still use it a lot because I love the keyboard on this machine.

Performance-wise it sometimes struggles with periodic background processes such as software update and malware scans but MS Teams and the other MS Office apps perform quite well.

It's indeed remarkable to see how little PC hardware has evolved the last 10 years compared to what we saw in the 80's and 90's. It seems we have less of More's law...

[sweh]

We've increased the number of cores, so Moore's Law has gone into parallelism.

In 2010 I bought a Core i5 750 2.66 GHz 4-Core and it cost me $200; that's $280 in today's money.

Last month I priced up a Ryzen 7 5700G 3.8 GHz 8-Core (16 threads, built in GPU) for $190 or a Ryzen 9 7900 3.6 GHz 12-Core (24 threads, built in GPU) for $420.

So in 13 years maybe 5.5 times the performance for 66% of the cost, or 8 times the performance for 150% of the cost.

But if you're doing single-threaded stuff then you won't see that.

[1024MAK]

My eyes are going so I have difficulty doing single-threaded stuff

Ba Dum tssshhh

Mark

[guesser]

Doubling the number of transistors on a die is a bit like doubling the number of grains of rice on squares of a chess board. Once I have enough to feed me for the rest of my life it becomes increasingly less relevant to me