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.
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.
I use GeForce Now. It fits my needs and the games I like to play. Why pay for my own gaming rig when I can rent it and let others cover the upgrading cost?
There are a few services that allow you to play with the actual game being rendered on remote computers, while your pc only shows the image and sends the input commands. I think the more popular ones are xcloud and geforce now. There are also a few smaller services that allow you to run anything you’d like, without limitations.
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.
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.
That’s what I’m still doing now. I upgraded the RAM a couple years ago and the GPU last year, both with cheap older parts that were about $100.
The main problem I’ve run into so far is that Blender no longer runs since they only support CPUs ten years old or newer. But I don’t do that stuff anymore really anyway.
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?
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?).
I’ll join with Technology Connections in being that guy who says (in a friendly way, not condescending):
If you have to rinse your dishes ever then you’re using the wrong soap, have a reeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaally crappy dishwasher (like a multi decade old cheapo model that’s breaking), or are loading your washer wrong. I think TCs video showing literally cooked on cheese coming off of dishes is pretty good proof that no dish out there needs rinsing.
I used to think my dishwasher couldn’t handle most things without rinsing, then I realized one of my sprayers had been blocked up and i also switched to a powder soap and suddenly everything is clean as fuck without any other changes to my loading habits. This was on a model slightly cheaper than the one TC uses in his video, and was about 7 years old when I saw improvement.
This is not criticism or anything, but simply trying to spread awareness of a simple thing I know a lot of people are surprised by when I tell them. Many of us are wasting time and effort on rinsing shit that doesn’t need to be, free yourselves!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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