Old hardware - a few thoughts

I read here a lot about how great it is to keep old hardware running with lightweight distros. I myself have an eight year old t410 as my daily driver and it does what it is asked to do.

But, I decided to give myself a treat and bought a T470 2 weeks ago. It is indeed a completely new experience, particularly when it comes to overall speed, internet speed and screen quality.

I guess what I want to say is: if one runs old hardware just for the sake of it, one misses out on a few things.

My t410 will stay as my backup machine that is for sure. But the new kid on the block gets all the attention.

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Using old hardware is good to reduce your personal environmental footprint, however my viewpoint had changed about this over time.

Old hardware often uses more electricity, so it’s only keeping landfills clean if everyone does that. If you have a desktop, you could replace the power supply and run more “Green”, but an old laptop? Unless you’re willing to fab your own or mod what’s there your PC is less environmentally-friendly than just using the latest stuff (toxicity of lead-free component manufacturer notwithstanding).

Far as old hardware goes, push it until it dies. Whatever you replace it with will most certainly be an improvement, save for build quality. After you can piece out what’s reusable and send the rest to a reputable E-waste facility to make sure your spent components aren’t rotting in some landfill.

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Well, for me even the t410 would be a speed daemon!

I agree also with @tiox , i have a 2008 dell desktop, but i don’t think changing the psu will change that much the power consumption, the cpu has only 3 states. Anyway it would be cool to know the idle and max power consumption of a new pc before buying it (mine is about 40Wh idle and 80Wh at full load, it’s an intel E8600, i can test it better with an instrument)

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Hallo Nope

There many aspects to this topic.

One of those is windoze machines that become slow over time due to the nature of the windoze way of doing things. These machines are candidates for the installation of GNU/Linux systems, after which they may well give a further 5 years of useful service. :penguin:

A part of the “environmental footprint” equation is the aspect - sufficient/luxurious. It is undoubtedly nice to have new shiny things, yet here again the old adage “moderation in all things” springs to mind. Each one of us has to solve the equation for themselves. :evergreen_tree: :airplane:

Moving from a T410 to a T470 must be nice. I expect you’ll soon be able to take advantage of Lenovo firmware updates as part of the normal update process [https://fwupd.org/]. :slight_smile:

A funny thing about the environmental footprint aspect; It shouldn’t even be something up for discussion should companies not cut corners, invest R&D into components assembled together with intention of future deconstruction and have as part of that price tag the labour for disassembling the device for recycling and refurbishing, but companies don’t want to invest time into taking it apart, they’d rather just toss components in the shredder when all is said and done because it’s easier for them to deal with, the average consumer doesn’t give a damn and it creates component scarcity when one doesn’t want to allow recycling of components which are perfectly serviceable long after support ends.

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I understand completely you reasons for upgrading.

But, I find almost 100% of the time, that replacing a spinning HDD with an SSD - running MATE of course -improves an old clunker out of sight!

Also, A RAM upgrade is nice along with the SSD - but not mandatory.

Screen/Graphics quality are much harder to improve on a laptop.

Agree.

In my case I decided it was time after 8 years to treat me with a new laptop. If this holds another 8 years all is fine.

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I can’t even remember when I got a new computer for my own usage. My Studio17 is 10 years old, won’t charge the battery anymore (yes, tried a new one), sometines the fan sounds like it’s about to self destruct, the lid has strapping tape along the edge to hold it together, yet it’s still going. It, along with a couple others, were hand-me-downs from the in-laws. My SFF machine I use as my “primary” was theirs, although they got rid of it after only a year because it ran like a frozen slug, and putting Linux on it surprisingly didn’t make it much better.

Other than that there’s a couple others I use for testing new releases on (like a laptop I acquired when my sister-in-law wanted me to salvage her files off of it). Then there’s my ex-HMC x3200 which works extra duty as a space-heater.

Did you try using an SSD? If that fails, try upgrading to a new processor of the same generation.