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Comment by eatonphil | Hacker News Reader

Any recommendations for a solid, representative crappy laptop? $100 xSomething Thinkpad off Ebay? Or is there something more representative of today.

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T500/W500, 4GB of RAM.

It's something like 13 years old, and ~$60.

It can run almost every website that hasn't been web-dev'ed into oblivion.

It balks at anything with memory leaks and inefficient CPU/GPU load.

It can run YouTube/Facebook/Twitter (surprisingly, for the last).

It can't run https://github.com/

> It can't run https://github.com/

It… what? I don’t know about Facebook, but GitHub is a good deal lighter than YouTube and Twitter. GitHub is one of the extremely few websites developed by a large number of people that aren’t atrociously resource-heavy and JavaScript-dependent.

I meant the very front-page/the landing page/i.e. https://github.com/

It cannot run it at all, because of all the graphics nonsense going on.

Fairly impressed that it runs Facebook. Out of all the websites I use, I find Facebook to be the most slow (presumably due to its heavy use of JS). This is despite most other websites I use preforming fine on my personal 2017-era X1 Carbon and work 2017-era MacBook. I'd have thought it would fall off the rails on a 13 year old machine!

Buy a 5-years old laptop off eBay, yes. In a good working order, but with a slow CPU, little RAM, and a mediocre screen (not even FHD). A thinkpad is a fine choice because they are usually made to last, so it won't keep breaking at you.

I'd go older. There's no shortage of 5-10 year old machines out in the wild. Plenty of very cheap t420 and x220s available for less than $100 on eBay.

5 years is not that old, i believe

Yeah I agree, I use 10 year old desktop and still don't concider it to be old.

While this is good for testing during development, A crappy laptop with a fresh install of windows, will be far less bad than a crappy laptop with a 6 year old full-of-crap windows.

I suggest doing the final test of your your site on:

* A friends old laptop, on their wifi, still logged in as them, and with them clicking the buttons with you watching over their shoulder.

* The same, but a friends old android phone, preferably with 'samsung browser'.

Yeah a T-series Thinkpad. We use them at work for dumb terminals for forms, COVID compliance nonsense, and random data entry points. They are surprisingly durable and still pretty solid.

Not just for that. I use a T460 with an old i5 as my daily driver. Runs like a charm. Helps that it runs Linux but it was OK with Windows 10 too.

Try the shittiest laptop at Walmart. Like an HP stream.

Remember the low res 1366x768 screen.

> Remember the low res 1366x768 screen.

The low... um. One of us is in a bubble. I'm typing this on a laptop with a 1280x800 screen and it's perfectly fine. Like, not super spacious but I code and browse the web on this box and I don't have any problems. (To be clear, it might well be me in the bubble; this laptop is over a decade old)

It’s low res relatively as it is roughy the lowest resolution still in use. Mid range laptops these days come with 1080p displays and high end is somewhere at or under 4K

Ah, you're right; if I look on Best Buy and Newegg I can buy new machines below 1080p but they're the very, very bottom of the barrel ($100 Chromebooks and those weird "technically a laptop" off-brand Android... things). Well, here's to a crisper future:) (That apparently arrived while I was distracted)

I don’t know if bubble is the right term here. WXGA (1366x768) is more common and more fubar, as the horizontal may vary between 1360 and 1372.

The point is to feel the pain. By any modern sensibility both resolutions are pretty awful, and experiencing it on a $200 consumer laptop is icing On the cake. Although I have clients who routinely test applications on ancient 800x600 displays due to legacy constraints.

Even a low-end modern system only takes you so far back in time.

Keep in mind that hardware improves roughly on line with Moore's Law. The gradation from low-end to mid-market might only be a few years of development.

The 10-year-old system is probably going to be much worse than a current low-end buy.

Try it first.

Moore’s law hasn’t been kind to x86 laptops, and the tricks used to speed things up are missing from low end celeron processors and binned SSDs. The cheap hardware and poor touchpads add to the charm.

I would bet that the 10 year old Lenovo would be surprisingly better than the shitty 2021 device.

CPU clock speeds haven't increased.

There's been SSDs, increased cache, increased memory speed, and more cores.

You might want to go back a bit more than 10 years, but yes, even a reasonably high-grade older system in my experience really dogs out on the current Web.

Trying small displays is essential!

My software engineer teammates get specially approved 4K displays and “engineering” laptops. People who use the apps are often restricted to “business” laptops. Conference rooms still use old projectors that are even lower resolution. We have no control over the displays our customers use.

I’ve been teaching my engineers to use the responsive design tools in their browsers. For UI components that render differently based on @media queries, it’s been helpful to add stories for those breakpoints to our Storybook component library.

When preparing to present to a remote audience, check how the slides will look for people connecting with a phone.

When recording a demo video, try to record at a lower resolution like 720p to save bandwidth and make it easier for people with small screens to watch.

Just see what's on offer at your local thrift shop.

I don't recommend garage sales, however. People tend to overvalue their electronics. I tried to buy a radio that was worth maybe $20 from some guy. He wouldn't part with it for less than $150 because it reminded him of his father. That's nice, but I'm not paying $130 for your memories.

Could it be that he was forced to sell it?

Maybe. His wife was standing right there. But I'm still not going to pay $130 for sentimentality that I cannot share.

You were not supposed to buy it, that was the point.

Just go to Walmart or Best Buy or your local equivalent and buy a cheap laptop, something that’s $600 tops and feels like the plastic is just barely held together.

$600 would be a prime dev laptop for me. I use the cheapest, non-chromebook, I can find then throw FreeBSD or Linux on it. I prefer desktops and spend much more money when I build one of those.

That would get you a reasonably fast processor and probably at least 8GB of RAM. That's not as low-end as many of your customers may be using.

The old target was a 2008-2010 MacBook Pro, one with a Core 2 Duo CPU

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