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Comment by apantel | Hacker News Reader

Computers can last a long long time. I built a pair of dev computers in 2012 for about $2500 each, using one of the fastest CPU’s on CPU Benchmark that was also quite cheap (about $350 per CPU). I still use one of them as my main dev computer. Nothing has ever broken inside it, not even a fan. The original SSD raid setup is still in place. It works as well as it ever did. I don’t notice any issues when all of the different IDE’s and tools I need are open.

11 years of daily driving.

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Same here, not into upgrading continuously for no good reason.

My primary home server (ZFS pools and hosting many VMs) is one I built in 2010, still nothing wrong with it. I keep wanting to upgrade to a new one but there's nothing wrong with it so can't really justify change.

My desktop mac mini is from 2014, works just fine. My windows laptop (toshiba) is from about 2009-2010 (I bought it used in 2011) and still works just fine (I don't use windows generally but have a bunch of niche astrophotography programs which are windows only).

Meanwhile... A Mac work laptop from 2021 lasted a year before the right side usbc ports both died. A Mac laptop from 2021 lasted a year before the screen died completely. The new machines have terrible quality problems.

My main dev machine is the same age and is similarly chugging along just fine. Cost £1400 in 2012.

It has no moving parts and I hoped this could lead to it lasting well beyond what I would normally expect.

Regardless of part wear, or the apparent lack thereof, it feels to me as performant as the day it was born.

My first personal desktop computer was old enough to start high school before I upgraded, though in its final years it was little more than a minecraft, youtube, and web browsing machine (a typical 14 year old). It was an old machine from our church in 2004, it had a Core2Quad and a 512MB Radeon graphics card, with 4GB of DDR2.

> My first personal desktop computer was old enough to start high school before I upgraded, though in its final years it was little more than a minecraft...

I hosted a minecraft server on a last gen P4 because the single threaded performance was that good (headless ubuntu). Intel hits these high spots were some hot chip keeps up with the next 7 years of CPUs.

Core 2 was launched in 2006, so the computer probably was either a few years newer or had an older-generation CPU.

Impressive lifespan nevertheless.

They said they purchased it in 2004, and it was given to me as a graduation present in 2011, so someone at our church must have upgraded it somewhere along the line. Doing a little searching, the Quad came out even later, in 2008 so it must have been around then. Presumably for the upgrade to Windows 7.

Now that I think about it, pastor's son was a gamer that spent all his time at the church, and I always thought it weird that a church had a discrete graphics card with DVI output in a back office machine...

I still have one of those small form factor Dell Optiplex 9020 (with i7 4790) and with the RAM upgraded to 16G and SSD this things feels super nice and snappy for what I use it for. I paid around $100 for it last year. I’m really starting to wonder if newer hardware has any real advantages for me.

Still use one cheap HP Compaq XP business machine from 2006, Pentium D which is really just two 32-bit Pentiums on one die to equal an early 64-bit AMD64. Runs W11 just fine once you coax it into existence on a BIOS PC. Linux too.

A slightly older XP Dell only has a single-core 32-bit CPU so no W11 for you, but W10 32-bit is still current and there's only 4GB of memory anyway. Debian on 32-bit looks like it may be supported for somewhat longer. Uses parallel PATA and/or serial SATA drives.

Both have floppies, parallel printer ports, serial COM ports, dual DVD readers/burners and telephone modems.

Same here, see my comment below. I should add that I do plenty of compiling programs from C# for a specific application and it's still almost instantaneous.

You bought that computer at the exact right time when the bulk of the industry talent went into trying to make mobile processors more power efficient rather than making desktop processors more powerful.

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