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Comment by yelling_cat | Hacker News Reader

I used to have an old Windows 2000 laptop without onboard WiFi that I called "Deadline" and used for the same purpose. If you have work you can do without connectivity for extended stretches I recommend it.

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I removed the wifi card in older thinkpad for the same reason. Turns out i rarely use it.

why not set a timer and disable wifi/network for the duration of the time you are setting aside to work without distraction. Or, maybe just close the tab/app with the distracting alerts? lots of way to achieve the same result without limiting yourself to such ancient hardware. Modern Macs have Do Not Disturb mode. I use this frequently

Why would using older hardware be limiting yourself any more than you just described? It just happens to do it by it's nature of being old instead of you deliberately limiting modern equipment.

As long as it works, why not use the hardware if you have it and it's still operational? Older desktop PC's have a certain power usage issue compared to modern ones, but laptops usually tend to keep power consumption down.

I run photoshop, after effects, premiere. Those tools are absolutely not going to run on older hardware. Anything media related would just a joke. Even tools like FFMPEG, ImageMagick would run like a turtle processing the media I'm processing on a daily basis. Just because I'm coding something doesn't mean that code isn't doing some heavy lifting that older hardware would be suffice.

If you need to do some heavy work then an older system obviously won't do. Editing files with Vim, on the other hand, works just fine with something like a Core 2 or Pentium M.

Everyone's use case is different, but in many cases, older hardware simply isn't a limitation.

Absolutely, I just used Deadline for writing and light diagramming. As a bonus I actually liked Win2k, it was stable and didn't get in my way. The only thing it was missing was font smoothing.

Why not step back in time? That is an experience in itself, as the author points out the keyboard does make a difference. Why vehemently oppose that?

If it were a '69 Camaro, 'vette, or Mustang, sure, the older hardware would be exciting. However, they would not be very good daily drivers. Their fuel efficiency is crap, their safety features are non-existent, but they do look cool. If all I did was boring text based code work, then maybe an old hunk-o-junk could suffice, yet it's fuel efficiency (battery life) would also suck. I do get the fact that they might be dirt cheap, but you better buy 2 of them because anyone with an old car that runs has a junk car to get parts from to keep the other one running.

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