this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
588 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
59534 readers
3199 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
when they say "older" PCs they're talking about machines with CPUs that are over 14 years old now.
You'd need to have replaced that CPU by now anyway.
Hard disagree. If this was the 80s or the 90s, you would have a case. But nowadays? 14 year old PCs are quite capable for many everyday uses.
The only people trying to convince you that you have to upgrade things every other year are the ones who sell them.
I got a core 2 duo (3gb of ram and a HDD as a boot drive, really ancient I know) computer, it's the only computer I have and I absolutely hate it since it sucks, even with Linux (xfce as a desktop) it takes so long to boot (usually 3 to 4 minutes, windows took like 6 to 7) and not to mention it being so laggy it struggles with launching Firefox and for example a file browser at the same time, and loading a webpage also takes a long time (around 20 seconds for Google, YouTube about 30 s)
Yeah, these computers are really just unusable even for really lightweight work, yeah "upgrade to a SSD, it will be blazing fast", wouldn't that just speed up the boot time? The least important thing? Since like I can just walk somewhere and then come back before it boots, but when I'm waiting for a webpage to load or a program to load up it's really that I do have to wait there, doing nothing in the meantime
An SSD really is the solution. You believe it just speeds up boot time, but it does speed up nearly everything else too.
Your Webpage? Your Browser loads it, stores new data into the cache and stalls while waiting for the HDD. Or it knows elements are in the cache and stalls waiting for them.
You click on the application menu? You PC tries to load 20 icons, tiny amounts of data an SSD has ready in a microsecond. Your HDD takes a full second because the seek between the 20 places where the icons are on the HDD takes so long.
I have some very old PCs I manage (mainly for relatives) and one couple uses a Core 2 Duo E6400 which should be quite similar to your PC. This PC is very usable for daily browsing with Ubuntu 22.04, boot time is about 25 seconds, then about 10 seconds to load up ebay. (I admit I optimized boot time quite a bit) The other PC they have is even slower than that, I just do not remember the exact CPU right now. That one is even used for old browser games similar to candy crush.
Of course it is not what I would use given the choice. I want to compile code in seconds, watch videos in glorious 4k and play a 3D game from time to time. But for them it works perfectly well, so well that they deny my offers to upgrade them